Map: States Where Human Rights Watch Documented Disappearances

Executive Summary

When Enrique Peña Nieto took office on December 1,
2012, he inherited a country reeling from an epidemic of drug violence that had
taken the lives of more than 60,000 Mexicans in six years. The “war on
drugs” launched by his predecessor, Felipe Calderón, had produced
disastrous results. Not only had it failed to rein in the country’s
powerful criminal groups, but it had led to a dramatic increase in grave human
rights violations committed by the security forces sent to confront them.
Rather than strengthening public security, these abuses had exacerbated a
climate of violence, lawlessness, and fear.

Throughout most of his presidency, Calderón denied
security forces had committed any abuses, despite mounting evidence to the
contrary. Only in his final year did he acknowledge that human rights
violations had occurred, and take a handful of positive—though very
limited—steps to curb some abusive practices. However, he failed to
fulfill his fundamental obligation to ensure that the egregious violations
committed by members of the military and police were investigated and the
perpetrators brought to justice.

That responsibility now falls to President Peña
Nieto. And nowhere is it more urgent than in cases where people have been taken
against their will and their fate is still unknown. What sets these crimes
apart is that, for as long as the fate of the victim remains unknown, they are
ongoing. Each day that passes is another that authorities have failed to find
victims, and another day that families continue to suffer the anguish of not
knowing what happened to a loved one.

Human Rights Watch has
documented nearly 250 such “disappearances” that have occurred
since 2007. In more than 140 of these cases, evidence suggests that these were enforced
disappearances—meaning that state agents participated directly in the
crime, or indirectly through support or acquiescence. These crimes were
committed by members of every security force involved in public security
operations, sometimes acting in conjunction with organized crime. In the
remaining cases, we were not able to determine based on available evidence
whether state actors participated in the crime, though they may have.

In nearly all of these cases, authorities failed to promptly
and thoroughly search for the victims or investigate the cases. Prosecutors
rarely carried out basic investigative steps crucial to finding missing
persons, too often opting instead to blame the victims and, reflecting the low
priority they place on solving such crimes, telling families to conduct the
searches on their own. When prosecutors did investigate, their efforts were
undermined by delays, errors, and omissions. Searches and investigations were
further hindered by structural problems such as overly narrow laws and the lack
of critical tools like a national database of the disappeared.

The inept or altogether absent efforts of authorities to
find people who are taken add to the suffering of victims’ families, for
whom not knowing what happened to their loved ones is a source of perpetual
anguish. Many relatives put aside everything else in their lives to search for
the missing, a quest they feel they cannot abandon until they learn the truth.
Making matters worse, victims’ families may lose access to basic social
services and benefits—such as healthcare and childcare—tied to the
victim’s employment, forcing them to fight costly and
emotionally-draining battles to restore the benefits.

The nearly 250 cases documented in this report by no means
represent all the disappearances that occurred in Mexico during the
Calderón administration. Quite the opposite, there is no question that
there are thousands more. Officials in Coahuila, for example, told Human Rights
Watch that 1,835 people had disappeared in that state alone from December 2006
to April 2012. More alarming still, a provisional list compiled by the Ministry
of the Interior and the Federal Prosecutor’s Office—which was
leaked in November 2012—contains the names of more than 25,000 people who
were disappeared or went missing during the Calderón years, and whose
fates remain unknown. While the list’s information is incomplete and its
methodology flawed, the number leaves little doubt as to the unprecedented
scale of the current wave of disappearances.

During the years the
Calderón administration ignored this mounting
“disappearance” problem, the country failed to take serious steps
to address it. The result was the most severe crisis of enforced disappearances
in Latin America in decades. If the Peña Nieto administration repeats this
mistake—and fails to set out a comprehensive, effective plan to
investigate past disappearances and help prevent them in the future—cases
of disappearances will almost certainly continue to mount. And thousands of
victims’ families will continue to endure the agony of not knowing what
happened to their loved ones.

A different approach is possible. Human Rights Watch
witnessed this in the state of Nuevo León, where government officials
and prosecutors, responding to pressure from victims’ families and human
rights defenders, have broken with a pattern of inaction and incompetence, and
begun to seriously investigate a select group of disappearances. Their efforts
have helped win back the trust of victims’ relatives and, with it, their
collaboration, which has proven critical to identifying new leads and gathering
valuable evidence. While at this time results in these investigations remain
limited and very few of the disappeared have been found, the approach provides
a blueprint for overcoming some of the greatest obstacles to resolving
disappearance cases.

Ultimately, the success of this and other state-level
efforts will depend in large measure on whether the federal government is
willing and able to do its part. This is, after all, a national problem, often
involving federal security forces and organized crime groups that operate
across state lines. The mass graves discovered in one state may well contain
the remains of people disappeared in others. A comprehensive
strategy—rooted in nationwide efforts such as the creation of unified,
accurate databases of the disappeared and unidentified remains—is
critical to give prosecutors, law enforcement officials, and families the tools
they need to find the missing and bring those responsible for their disappearances
to justice.

Enforced Disappearances

Human Rights Watch has
documented 249 disappearances committed in Mexico since December 2006. In 149
of these cases, we found compelling evidence that state actors participated in
the crime, either acting on their own or collaborating with criminal groups.
Members of every security force engaged in public security operations
—the Army and the Navy, the Federal Police, and state and municipal
police—are implicated in these 149 cases.

The majority of the likely enforced disappearance cases we
documented follow a pattern. Members of security forces arbitrarily detain
individuals without arrest orders or probable cause. In many cases, these
detentions occur in victims’ homes, in front of family members; in others,
they take place at security checkpoints, at workplaces, or in public venues,
such as bars. Soldiers and police who carry out these detentions almost always
wear uniforms and drive official vehicles. When victims’ relatives
inquire about detainees’ whereabouts at the headquarters of security
forces and public prosecutors’ offices, they are told that the detentions
never took place.

In some instances, evidence suggests that a specific
security force carried out multiple disappearances using the same tactics,
within a narrow period of time, and in the same geographical area. For example,
Human Rights Watch collected witness testimony and photographic and video
evidence showing that members of the Navy committed more than 20 abductions in
June and July 2011, in the border states of Coahuila, Nuevo León, and
Tamaulipas. Almost all of these people were arbitrarily detained by members of
the Navy in their homes. The Navy initially denied having taken the men, only
to contradict itself later by admitting in news releases that it had come into
contact with several of the men before they disappeared. The individuals have
not been seen since they were arrested. The common modus operandi in
these cases suggests that these crimes may have been planned and coordinated,
or at the very least could not have taken place without the knowledge of
high-ranking Navy officials.

In cases where state agents work with organized crime in
carrying out disappearances, the collaboration may take one of many different
forms. Most commonly, security forces arbitrarily detain victims and then hand
them over to criminal groups. Police, soldiers, and investigators may also work
with criminal groups to extort the families of the victims, or tell those
groups when victims’ relatives report disappearances—information
that abductors then use to harass and intimidate families. In more than a dozen
cases, evidence pointed to state agents taking advantage of information
obtained from families to pose as kidnappers and demand ransom from
victims’ relatives.

In addition to these enforced disappearance cases, we also
documented 100 other cases of disappearances. In these cases, individuals were
taken against their will—often by armed men—and their whereabouts
remain unknown. We are not aware of evidence of the participation of state
actors in these crimes. However, given the widespread involvement of police and
military personnel evidenced in other disappearances, in the absence of
thorough investigations, it is impossible to rule out the participation of
state actors in these cases. In any case, although these
“disappearances” carried out purely by private individuals as a
criminal act—unlike “enforced disappearances”—do not
fall under the definition of the International Convention for the Protection of
All Persons from Enforced Disappearances, the state has a responsibility to
investigate all disappearances, regardless of the perpetrator. Furthermore,
under international law and Mexico’s newly passed Victims’ Law, the
government has an obligation to provide victims of crimes with an effective
remedy—including justice, truth, and adequate reparations.

Investigative Failures

Our research shows that
authorities routinely fail to respond in a timely fashion when victims, their
families, or witnesses report abductions while they are taking place. And when
victims’ relatives or others report disappearances, prosecutors and law
enforcement officials rarely take immediate action to search for the victim or
the perpetrators. In spite of requests by families, they do not trace
victims’ cell phones, track their bank transactions, obtain security
camera footage (which is often automatically deleted at regular intervals), or
take other time-sensitive actions. Instead, prosecutors and law enforcement
officials regularly misinform families that the law requires a person to have
been missing for several days before a formal complaint can be filed, and
advise them to search for missing people at police stations and military
bases—placing the family at risk; or prosecutors preemptively assert they
lack the legal jurisdiction to investigate the case. These groundless delays
and omissions result in irreparable losses of information that could
potentially have saved the lives of victims and helped locate the people who
abducted them.

Making matters worse,
when prosecutors, judicial police, and law enforcement officials attend to
families of the disappeared, they regularly tell them the victims were likely
targeted because they were involved in illicit activities, even when there is
no evidence for such assertions. Authorities use this unfounded presumption as
a pretext for not opening investigations, and alienate and harass individuals
whose cooperation often could have played a critical role in finding the
missing person. While it is reasonable for authorities to investigate the
background of a victim as a possible lead, Human Rights Watch found that
officials repeatedly assumed the criminal guilt of victims before conducting
any preliminary investigation, and held onto such views in the face of clear
evidence to the contrary.

If and when prosecutors open investigations, they regularly
ask victims’ families to take investigative steps, such as interviewing
witnesses and tracking down suspects, which should be carried out by officials.
It is appropriate and indeed necessary for prosecutors to collaborate with
victims’ relatives in investigating disappearances. Yet in case after
case, Human Rights Watch found that they relied disproportionately, or even
entirely, on families to carry out key investigative tasks. In a vicious cycle,
families take on more of the authorities’ duties because they know that
investigators will not investigate on their own. And rather than fulfilling
their investigative responsibilities, prosecutors and law enforcement officials
become more accustomed to passing them off to victims’ relatives. Not
only are families not trained for such tasks, but carrying them out can also
put them at considerable risk: in several cases, families’ investigative
efforts— encouraged by prosecutors—resulted in their being victims
of threats and attacks.

In addition to relying excessively on families, prosecutors
fail to carry out basic investigative steps. Among the most common lapses
documented by Human Rights Watch were: failing to interview the victims’
family members, witnesses, or others who could have provided relevant leads;
failing to interview possible suspects; failing to pursue obvious lines of
investigation, such as obtaining the names of police officers and soldiers
assigned to units implicated in disappearances; and failing to visit the scene
of the crime to collect evidence. Even in cases where justice officials carried
out basic investigative steps, they often waited so long to complete them that
possible leads dissipated.

Prosecutors and law enforcement officers also misplaced key
evidence, such as DNA samples of victims’ relatives, and made errors in
compiling information critical to the case, such as recording inaccurate
details about when or where victims disappeared. In some cases, police and
justice officials fabricated evidence—claiming to have carried out
interviews that never occurred, for example—while in others they
manipulated or destroyed key evidence, suggesting that they may have been
working to protect those responsible for the crimes.

Beyond failing to resolve individual cases and exacerbating
a general climate of impunity, these investigative failures allow security
forces and criminal groups that carry out multiple disappearances to strike
again. In several cases, Human Rights Watch found compelling evidence that the
same state agents—often in collaboration with criminal
groups—carried out multiple disappearances in separate incidents. In
these cases, prosecutors and law enforcement officials neglected to pursue
evidence that, had it been adequately investigated, may have prevented additional
people from being disappeared.

Impact on Victims’
Families

Disappearances have a profound impact on virtually every
aspect of the lives of victims’ families. Families described not knowing
what happened to their loved ones as a source of perpetual anguish—one
deepened by the lackluster efforts of prosecutors to find their relatives. Many
described an overriding sense of obligation to set aside the other parts of
their lives in order to dedicate themselves fully to searching for their loved
ones. Relatives reported suffering serious emotional and psychological effects
as a result of their loss—including depression and the constant fear that
another loved one would be taken next. Several relatives of the disappeared in
the cases documented here, including at least one child, attempted to commit
suicide. Disappearances also take a heavy toll on relationships among
victims’ surviving relatives, who cope in different and at times
conflicting ways, with disputes sometimes arising over sensitive issues such as
whether to keep looking for the missing.

Families who do keep searching for the missing, publicly
discuss their cases, or press authorities to investigate often are subject to
harassment, threats, and attacks. These hostile acts are often aimed at dissuading
relatives from pressing for accountability, and play on relatives’ terror
of losing another loved one. Furthermore, such hostile acts terrorize not only
the people they target, but also other relatives of the disappeared and members
of the public, who fear that calling for justice will put them at risk.

In Mexico, disappearances also have devastating financial
consequences for victims’ families, with particularly significant impact
on vulnerable groups such as children and families living in poverty. The
overwhelming majority of disappeared persons in the cases documented by Human
Rights Watch were working class men, who were often the sole wage earners in
households with several children. In their absence, their spouses and partners
were forced to take immediate measures to adapt to the loss of income and
provide for their families. This hardship is aggravated by the system of social
services in Mexico, whereby the receipt of some services are conditional upon a
member of the household being employed. Therefore, a disappearance can lead to
the suspension of access to social benefits such as healthcare and childcare.
In order to maintain access to these crucial services, relatives were forced to
initiate a costly and protracted bureaucratic process to obtain recognition
that the disappeared person was missing or dead, which heightened their
suffering.

The Special Prosecutor’s Office for Attention to
Victims of Crimes (PROVÍCTIMA) was set up in 2011 to assist the families
of victims emotionally, economically, and legally, with a special focus on
helping the families of the disappeared. Most of the families interviewed by
Human Rights Watch had never come into contact with the agency, and had little
to no understanding of the services it offered. Meanwhile, more than 30
families of victims who had sought assistance from PROVÍCTIMA told Human
Rights Watch that the agency failed to deliver on commitments it had
made—such as providing medical aid for relatives’ operations.
Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of these families said PROVÍCTIMA
pressured relatives to accept that their loved ones were dead, even though no
evidence had been uncovered to substantiate that conclusion, exacerbating their
suffering.

A New Approach: the Example of
Nuevo León

Nuevo León has been one of the states hardest hit by
disappearances in recent years, with estimates ranging from over 600 (by
official estimates) to more than 1,000 people disappeared (according to local
human rights defenders) since the beginning of the Calderón
administration. In 2010 and 2011, Human Rights Watch carried out several
fact-finding visits to Nuevo León to investigate enforced disappearances
and other abuses, and observed a climate of near-total impunity similar to what
we had found in several other states of Mexico. Despite clear evidence of
enforced disappearances, state prosecutors consistently failed to prosecute the
members of the military and police who had committed them. Victims and their
families grew deeply disillusioned with authorities, while even
well-intentioned prosecutors had little incentive to investigate these crimes.
In a vicious cycle of distrust and dysfunction, the less that victims and
officials collaborated in solving these crimes, the more entrenched the climate
of impunity became.

Then came the shift. Catalyzed by a grassroots
victims’ movement and partnered with a local human rights group, families
of the disappeared collectively demanded that authorities begin to take the
investigations seriously. Under considerable pressure, state officials agreed
to work with the families in investigating their cases. At first, both sides
were distrustful. However, when prosecutors—motivated by families to
investigate and held accountable when they did not—began to genuinely
look into the crimes, they gradually began to win back the trust of the
victims’ relatives. And families, in turn, began to collaborate more
openly with prosecutors. The combination of real efforts by prosecutors and the
guiding hand of families gave rise to a new dynamic, which allowed
investigations to move forward for the first time in years.

Progress in individual investigations, however small, made
it possible to believe that these horrific crimes, many of which appeared to
implicate state agents, could be solved. A virtuous cycle started to take the
place of a vicious one: the more prosecutors investigated, the more they earned
the trust of victims’ families, and the more investigations advanced. For
their part, prosecutors took the solid investigative tactics and skills they
had learned working on one case or another and applied them to other
disappearances on their docket. Over fifty suspects have been charged in seven
of the cases tackled through the “working meetings” with families
and human rights defenders. Even in those cases in which suspects have not been
charged, the investigations have progressed, as prosecutors have pursued
long-neglected steps—such as summoning suspects for questioning,
canvassing for witnesses, and pressing telephone companies to hand over
victims’ cell phone records—with a renewed sense of urgency and
purpose.

This qualitative work on individual cases has been coupled
with broader institutional and legal reforms aimed at strengthening the
capacity of authorities to prosecute these crimes, such as passing legislation
that criminalizes enforced disappearances, assigning special judicial police to
investigate disappearances, and drafting an investigation manual that lays out
fundamental steps that every prosecutor should take when investigating a
disappearance.

For all of the progress that has been made in investigating
disappearances in Nuevo León, the challenges that remain to effectively
investigating disappearances and finding those who have gone missing are
daunting. Authorities whose input is critical to advancing investigations often
fail to cooperate with the efforts of prosecutors to solve cases—or
worse, intentionally obstruct them. Some families, frustrated with the limited
progress in their investigations, and understandably skeptical of
authorities’ commitment given their previous experiences, have lost faith
in the process and stopped cooperating with prosecutors. And state prosecutors
have been alarmingly slow to apply the solid investigative practices developed
in the “working meetings” to the hundreds of other disappearances
that are not directly monitored by families and human rights defenders, in some
cases repeating the same chronic investigative errors and omissions in new
cases.

Due to these and other serious obstacles, advances in the
investigations have been limited. The fate of the overwhelming majority of the
disappeared remains unknown. And despite having charged more than 50 suspects
in investigations tied to the “working meetings,” prosecutors have
yet to obtain a conviction. Nevertheless, the step of breaking through a
climate of disillusionment and distrust in select cases is real. In that way,
the working process in Nuevo León provides a blueprint for how some of
the greatest challenges to investigating not only disappearances, but all human
rights violations in Mexico, can be overcome.

Recommendations

To the Federal Executive Branch:

Present a proposal to Congress to reform the
military justice system to ensure that all alleged human rights violations,
including enforced disappearances, committed by members of the military against
civilians are investigated and prosecuted in the civilian justice system.

Sign an executive order mandating that all
detainees be immediately presented before the public prosecutor’s office
and that under no circumstances should detainees be taken to military
installations, police stations, or illegal detention facilities for interrogation
by members of the military or police.

Work with federal agencies such as the
Institute of Social Security to develop special, expedited processes to ensure
that families of the disappeared do not lose access to basic social services as
a result of disappearances.

Request that the Senate recognize the
jurisdiction of the Committee on Enforced Disappearances to receive complaints
of enforced disappearances submitted by individuals and states (pursuant to
articles 31 and 32 of the International Convention for the Protection of All
Persons from Enforced Disappearance).

Issue an invitation for the Committee on
Enforced Disappearances to conduct a fact-finding visit to Mexico.

Establish a national database of the
disappeared that includes key information to help identify missing persons,
such as genetic information (DNA) from relatives of the victim, evidence of the
participation of state actors, and investigations that have been opened into
the case. The criteria for and collection of such data should be standardized
across prosecutors’ offices, human rights commissions, morgues, and other
relevant institutions to ensure the utility of the system.

Establish a national database of
unidentified human remains, including genetic information (DNA) and other
distinguishing characteristics. The criteria for and collection of data should
be consistent with the data collected for the database of the disappeared.

Conduct a thorough comparison between the
national database of the disappeared and the national database of unidentified
human remains to search for matches between disappeared persons and
unidentified remains.

To Federal and State Prosecutors:

Conduct immediate, full investigations into
all alleged cases of disappearances, including those documented in this report,
with a view to prosecuting all parties responsible for the crime under national
and international law.

Abstain from transferring from civilian to
military jurisdiction cases in which a member of the military is accused of
being involved in an enforced disappearance or any other human rights
violation.

End the practice of requiring victims’
families to gather evidence relating to the disappearance of relatives, such as
evidence of the possible participation of security forces.

Train teams of experts in the exhumation and
identification of remains so that experts can be deployed quickly when mass
graves and other unidentified bodies are discovered.

Develop a national protocol in conjunction
with law enforcement officials for promptly and thoroughly searching for
persons who have been reported as disappeared. Such efforts should be initiated
without delay, and should involve the full range of security forces and other
authorities.

To Federal and State Legislators:

Amend or insert the definition of enforced
disappearance in federal and state criminal codes to ensure that it is
consistent across jurisdictions and includes all conduct included in the
definitions established by the International Convention for the Protection of
All Persons from Enforced Disappearance and the Inter-American Convention on
Forced Disappearance of Persons. In particular, ensure that the definition
includes disappearances committed by organized groups or private individuals
acting on behalf of, or with the support (direct or indirect), consent, or
acquiescence of state officials.

Reform the Military Code of Justice to
ensure that all alleged human rights violations, including enforced disappearances,
committed by members of the military against civilians are investigated and
prosecuted in the civilian justice system.

Modify the definition and the process by
which a person is formally declared “absent” (declaración
de ausencia) in the Federal Civil Code to prevent the loss of basic social
services by families of disappeared persons.

Modify vague “flagrancy” laws
currently used to justify arbitrary arrests and unjustified preventive
detention. These laws should be applicable only in exceptional cases when a
suspect is caught in the act of committing a crime.

Recognize the jurisdiction of the Committee
on Enforced Disappearances to receive
complaints of enforced disappearances submitted by individuals and states.

Methodology

This report is based on in-depth research on disappearances
in Mexico conducted between January 2012 and February 2013, including
fact-finding investigations in the states of Coahuila, Guanajuato, Nuevo
León, San Luis Potosí, and Zacatecas. In the course of these
investigations, researchers also met with families whose relatives had
disappeared in other states, such as Tamaulipas and Michoacán. The
report also draws upon Human Rights Watch’s research on disappearances
for the November 2011 report, Neither Rights Nor Security, which
documented cases in Baja California, Chihuahua, Guerrero, and Nuevo
León. In all, the disappearances detailed in this report took place in
11 states, representing a geographically and politically diverse cross-section
of the country.

This report will use “enforced disappearance”
and “disappearance” as distinct terms. The term “enforced
disappearance,” following the definition set out by treaties such as the
International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced
Disappearance, will be applied to cases in which there is compelling evidence
of three cumulative elements:

The deprivation of liberty against the will
of the person concerned;

The involvement of state agents, either
directly or indirectly through authorization, support, or acquiescence; and

The refusal to disclose the fate and
whereabouts of the person concerned.[1]

The term “disappearance,” by contrast, will be
applied to cases in which there is only evidence of two of the three
aforementioned elements: the taking of a person against his or her will, and
the failure to disclose his or her fate and whereabouts. The distinction,
therefore, is that in a “disappearance” there is not compelling
evidence of the involvement of stage agents.

Human Rights Watch documented 249 disappearances committed
during the Calderón administration for this report. In 149 of those
cases, the evidence strongly suggests they were enforced disappearances—meaning
state actors likely participated in the crime. To reach this determination, we
relied on a range of official documents such as arrest reports, detention
registers, complaints filed by victims’ relatives, witness testimony,
investigation case files, press releases by officials, amparos,[2]
and reports by government rights commissions.[3] These
documents were supplemented by additional sources of evidence which pointed to
the participation of state agents in specific cases—much of it gathered
by victims’ families, local human rights defenders, and
journalists—including: security camera surveillance videos, witness video
footage, audio recordings by victims’ families of meetings with
officials, photographs of abductions, and maps of the signals emitted by
victims’ cell phones or radios. In the remaining 100 of the 249 cases,
there was not sufficient evidence to conclude that state actors had
participated in the crimes, though they may have.

In certain cases in this report, Human Rights Watch cites
official confessions by individuals accused of having participated in enforced
disappearances. It is relevant to note that our previous report, Neither
Rights Nor Security, documented the systematic use of torture by security
forces in five states during the administration of President Felipe
Calderón. Oftentimes, these tactics were aimed at extracting forced
confessions that not only accepted guilt, but also a posteriori
concealed the abuses by security forces leading up to and during coercive
interrogations. Given the prevalence of this practice, and the doubt it casts
on the truthfulness of confessions obtained by officials, this report only
cites confessions of alleged involvement in crimes when such statements are
corroborated by and consistent with other credible evidence—such as
witness accounts, video footage, or official arrest reports. And each time the
report cites such confessions, Human Rights Watch has noted that the widespread
use of torture should be taken into account when weighing their evidentiary
value.

The report also notes when individuals have been charged in
disappearance cases. While being charged with a crime (consignado under
Mexican law) requires the authorization of a judge, it is not—nor should
it be read as—an indication of guilt.

In the course of the research, Human Rights Watch conducted
more than 100 interviews with a wide array of actors. These included attorneys
general, prosecutors, law enforcement chiefs, police officers, legislators,
national and state human rights officials, victims’ relatives, human
rights defenders, and journalists, among others, as well as a range of federal
officials. We also drew on official statistics, which we sought through
interviews, emails, and public information requests submitted through Mexico’s
Federal Institute for Access to Public Information (Instituto Federal de
Acceso a la Información y Protección de Datos).

In some of the interviews conducted by Human Rights Watch,
victims’ families, friends, and witnesses requested that their
names—as well as those of the disappeared—be withheld to protect
their identities. Often this request was motivated by the fear that speaking
publicly about the case could bring harm to the disappeared person, or even
lead to another person being disappeared as retribution for denouncing the
crimes of criminal groups or authorities. Others asked that the cases they
shared not be included in the report, driven by similar concerns. Several state
officials who spoke with Human Rights Watch about disappearances asked that
their names be withheld, but permitted us to include the government
institutions for which they worked.

Translations from the original
Spanish to English are by Human Rights Watch.

Enforced Disappearances

There is strong evidence that 149 of the 249 abductions
Human Rights Watch investigated for this report were enforced disappearances
involving public security personnel. Members of all of the security forces
participating in public security operations—federal, state, and municipal
police, the Army, and the Navy, as well as judicial police—are implicated
in the cases. Members of municipal police forces, who in many instances
colluded with organized crime, are implicated in more cases than members of
other forces.

In the 149 cases, the victims were virtually always
seen by eyewitnesses being taken into custody, most often without evident
justification, by police or the military. These illegal detentions were
virtually never officially registered, nor were detainees handed over to the
public prosecutor’s office, as the law requires. The failure to register
detentions and promptly hand detainees over to prosecutors has obstructed
efforts of families and authorities to search for the missing people. In cases
where security forces appeared to act on their own, victims were never seen
after their illegal arrests. In other cases, there is evidence that members of
the police or military handed over people to criminal groups after illegally
detaining them, or joined armed men in carrying out abductions, and then denied
participating in the crime. Sometimes the collaboration between authorities
came after people were abducted—when state agents helped criminal groups
extort the families of the victims.

Human Rights Watch collected a wide range of evidence that
ties officials to these 149 cases. In many instances, officials explicitly
identified themselves to families and witnesses as police or soldiers when they
were carrying out the arbitrary detentions that led to disappearances. Members
of security forces often wore uniforms and drove official vehicles used in
abductions, and in several cases were captured on video or in photographs. In
many instances, the testimonies of family members were confirmed by independent
witnesses. Indeed, in several cases, security forces admitted to having taken
the individuals in question into custody.

Government officials have at times said that crimes
allegedly committed by soldiers or police in uniform were likely carried out by
people disguised as members of security forces. While it is true that on a few
occasions in recent years criminal groups have employed counterfeit uniforms
and vehicles, government officials interviewed for this report were unable to
identify a single case in which there was any evidence that criminals had posed
as members of a security force to carry out a disappearance. The dearth of
examples, coupled with the fact that, as this report shows, criminal groups
openly carry out disappearances with near total impunity, casts serious doubt
on whether any of the cases documented here were carried out by individuals
using counterfeit uniforms and vehicles.

In the 149 cases in which evidence strongly suggests
that enforced disappearances were perpetrated by state agents, the facts point
to a clear modus operandi on the part of security forces. In some
instances, there is evidence that a specific security force carried out
multiple disappearances in a limited period of time within the same
geographical area, suggesting that some of these crimes may have been planned
and coordinated, or at the very least could not have taken place without the
knowledge of high-ranking authorities.

Enforced Disappearances by the Navy

Human Rights Watch documented more than 20 cases of
enforced disappearances perpetrated by members of the Navy in June and July
2011. The concentration of the cases within a short time period, the similar
tactics described by victims’ families and other witnesses, corroborated
by photographic and video evidence, and the fact that the abductions were
spread across three northern states strongly suggests that these were not
isolated cases, but rather points to a clear modus operandi by the Navy.
Given the number of members of the Navy that allegedly participated in these
operations—at least a dozen official vehicles, according to witness
accounts—and the fact that the Navy acknowledged that it detained several
of the victims, it is unlikely that such operations took place without the
knowledge of ranking officers.

Victims’ families and witnesses described near
identical tactics in the raids. In each case, the Navy arrived in a large
convoy of more than a dozen vehicles, the majority of which were marked with
official insignia, along with two to four unmarked vehicles. They closed off
entire streets, using vehicles as barricades. Heavily armed members of the Navy
wearing masks then entered homes, often forcibly, without any search or arrest
warrants. According to families, the people in Navy uniforms were not looking
for individuals by name. Instead, they indiscriminately took young men, telling
their families they were being brought in for questioning and would be released
if they proved to be innocent.

José Fortino Martínez Martínez,
33, who ran a convenience store in a school with his wife in Nuevo Laredo,
Tamaulipas, was sleeping at home with his wife and four children (ages 16, 12,
7, and 3) on June 5, 2011, when they awoke at 1 a.m. to the sound of their
front gate being broken open. Martínez’s wife, Oralia Guadalupe
Villaseñor Vázquez, told Human Rights Watch she turned on the
light to discover seven or eight masked men entering their bedroom.[4]
The men were armed with large weapons and wearing bulletproof vests that said
“Marina” (“Navy” in Spanish). After the men had
searched all of the rooms, one of them approached a man who appeared to be a
commanding officer and said, “It is just family.”[5]The officer apologized to
Martínez’s wife for breaking down the door of their home. He
handed her 200 pesos to cover the damage and said, “They complained that
there was something going on here, so that is why we entered like that.”[6]The officer did not specify who had
complained.

The members of the Navy then took Martínez outside
for questioning. From the entryway, his wife said she counted 14 vehicles
marked with Navy insignia—most of them pick-up trucks, several of which
had mounted guns in their bays—and four unmarked cars.[7]
After several minutes of questioning, the members of the Navy let
Martínez go back inside his home. But minutes later they summoned him
outside again, saying they needed to check his fingerprints. His wife was told
to wait inside the home with their children. Approximately half an hour later,
his wife heard the screech of tires. When she went outside, she said, the
vehicles in the convoy were driving away. Several neighbors who had gathered
outside told Martínez’s wife that they had seen the Navy put him
into the back of a car before driving off.

Martínez’s wife immediately got in her car and
began driving around Nuevo Laredo in search of the convoy, methodically
checking each of the major roadways. She came across the convoy on a highway
near the airport, she said, and followed them from a distance as they carried
out raids on several other homes. At one of the raids, Martínez’s
wife approached an armed, masked man in a vest that said “Navy”
(“Marina”). She asked why they had detained her husband and where
they were taking him. The man answered that they had not detained anyone.

Martínez’s wife said she saw four men
handcuffed in the bay of one of the pick-ups.[8] One had
a bag pulled over his head, one was blindfolded, and the other two had their
shirts pulled over their heads. As she looked at the detainees, the man she was
speaking to warned her to stop following the convoy. If she did not, he warned
her, they would shoot at her vehicle. He said they had been authorized to fire
their weapons at will, regardless of whether their targets were women and
children.[9] She
returned to her car.

In spite of the threat, Martínez’s wife told
Human Rights Watch she continued to follow the convoy until it arrived at the
Motel Santa Monica in downtown Nuevo Laredo. As news spread that the detainees
were being held there, more than a dozen friends and relatives of people who
had been taken assembled outside of the motel, together with members of the
local press. The people gathered near the entrance to the parking lot of the
hotel, which was surrounded by a wall. Martínez’s wife, his children,
and others waited there for approximately two hours.[10]

The presence of Martínez’s wife and other
witnesses outside of the hotel was captured by video footage and photographs
from that night provided to Human Rights Watch.[11]
The video shows at least four Navy pick-up trucks in the motel parking lot,
identifiable by official insignia on their doors.[12]
It also shows several dozen armed men, wearing masks and uniforms bearing the
name “Navy,” walking back and forth outside the motel. A pick-up
truck with the Navy insignia on its door, marked as unit number 600160, is
shown in the video at the parking lot entrance.[13]
The truck was directed outwards, towards the street where people had gathered.[14]
Several photographs show a masked man in a Navy uniform standing in the
truck’s cargo bay, manning a mounted gun.[15]
At one point, the photographs show, another masked man in a Navy uniform walked
into the street next to the motel and began to photograph members of the crowd
who had gathered there.[16]

One of Martínez’s sons, age 16, who was also
outside the motel, told his mother that he spotted his father through one of
the windows of a room on the motel’s second floor.[17]
After his father walked by the window, the son said, the curtain was drawn closed
swiftly by a man in a Navy uniform. At approximately 6 a.m., after several
hours of waiting there, the convoy left the hotel. From videos and pictures
taken by victims’ family members as the convoy left the hotel, Human
Rights Watch was able to identify the Navy insignia and unit numbers on five of
the pick-up trucks, as well as the license plates of several of the
non-official vehicles.[18]

Martínez’s wife continued to follow the convoy
after it left the motel. She said she observed the vehicles as they stopped
outside a location in the Mirador neighborhood of Nuevo Laredo.[19]
She said Navy vehicles blocked off two ends of a residential block, just as
they had done on her block when they took her husband.

Human Rights Watch separately interviewed the mother of Martín
Rico García, 41, who said her son was arbitrarily detained by people
in Navy uniforms on the morning of June 5, 2011, also in Nuevo Laredo,
Tamaulipas. Rico García’s mother confirmed that the street where
Martínez’s wife observed members of the Navy carrying out another
raid that morning was her street, lending credibility to both accounts.[20]
She also confirmed the raid had occurred at approximately 6 a.m.

Martín Rico García’s family described
similar tactics in his arbitrary detention. His mother said armed, masked men
in Navy uniforms had come to her door and demanded she open it.[21]
When she did, they identified themselves as members of the Navy and said they
were carrying out an investigation. She asked if they had a warrant to search
the home, but they said they did not need one. They searched the house and
detained her son and her grandson. She said that the members of the Navy asked
her how old her grandson was.[22]When she told them he was 17, the men let
him go. They told Rico García’s mother they were taking her son to
their base, leaving her with no record of the detention.

According to Martínez’s wife, after men in Navy
uniforms stopped at Rico García’s home, they proceeded to a gas
station, where she was able to approach a man in a Navy uniform to ask what
would happen to her husband.[23] The man
responded, “He will be investigated. If there is nothing on him, he will
be set free.” When she told him that her husband had done nothing wrong,
he responded, “Many say that they weren’t up to anything. But these
guys behave one way at home and another in the streets. They are not all little
white doves.” Then, the man warned her that she would be shot if she
continued to follow the convoy. Afraid for her children, she stayed in the gas
station when the convoy departed. She never saw her husband again.

The Navy provided conflicting accounts as to whether it had
any contact with Martínez, Rico García, and at least four other
men who were arbitrarily detained on June 4 and 5, 2011. After several press
reports that the Navy had arbitrarily detained the men, the Navy issued a press
release on June 14 claiming that “[w]ith respect to various news stories
disseminated in assorted print media and websites, [the institution]
categorically denies that Navy personnel participated in said
operations.”[24]Approximately two weeks later, the Navy
contradicted its initial assertion in a second press release, stating:

Acting on intelligence that suggested the presence of
members of organized crime in various homes in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, upon
inspecting these locations on [June 5], the Navy acknowledges that it had
contact with six of the people supposedly detained, of the names José
Fortino Martínez, José Cruz Díaz Camarillo, Héctor
Rodríguez Vázquez, Martín Rico García, Diego Omar
Guillén Martínez and Usiel Gómez Rivera. Up to the present
there is no evidence that suggests that Navy personal secured, much less
unlawfully deprived these persons of their liberty. Also, it should be pointed
out no evidence has been found establishing that these individuals belonged to
any criminal cell.[25]

The press release suggested that the six men may have been
detained by organized crime after coming into contact with Navy
personnel on the same day, “presumably with the aim of fueling
allegations that detract from security operations designed to guarantee the
safety of the public.”[26] In
other words, the Navy implied that the victims may have been disappeared by
criminal groups, who wanted to make it appear as though the crimes were
committed by the Navy in order to hurt the reputation of the institution.

The Navy changed its narrative of the events a third time in
a November 2011 account provided to the federal prosecutor’s office. In
it, the Navy said that it had indeed come into contact with the six missing men
in Colombia, Nuevo León—a different location from the one it
identified in a previous press release.[27]The account also claimed that the six
missing men had told the Navy that “they had been forced, under threat,
to work for the Zetas criminal group, as a result of which [the six victims]
were asked to cooperate [with the Navy] to provide information on the matter;
the individuals were offered protection during the duration of Navy forces in
that location. Then they were transferred to the town of Miguel Alemán,
Tamaulipas, for their safety.”[28]

Among the many contradictions between this and earlier
accounts is the fact that, while the Navy’s previous account alleged that
the victims had no connection to any organized crime group,[29]
the latter account said the victims had been forced to work for the Zetas. It
is also unclear why the Navy would allegedly transport the six men to the bus
station in Miguel Alemán, Tamaulipas, “for their safety.”
None of the victims lived in Miguel Alemán.[30]Moreover, it is a city notorious for being
one of the most violent in the state (for example, there were several public
shootouts involving the military and armed criminal groups shortly before this
incident), and for having a significant presence of organized crime groups, in
particular the Zetas.[31]

Human Rights Watch
interviewed relatives of two other men who were arbitrarily detained on the
same night as Martínez; these relatives corroborated the chronology of
detentions, and described similar tactics. Yadira Alejandra Martínez
Ramírez, 23, for example, said her husband, Diego Omar Guillén
Martínez, 24, was detained late on the night of June 4, 2011, by
eight armed, masked men in Navy uniforms who forced their way into his
parents’ house and took him without explanation.[32] None of the six men have been seen since that
night.

The disappearances carried out on June 4 and 5, 2011, in
Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, are similar in important respects to several other
disappearances carried out in the neighboring states of Nuevo León and
Coahuila during the same month. In those cases, robust evidence from multiple
sources also points to the involvement of the Navy, suggesting all of these
disappearances may have been part of a regional operation. For example, on June
23, 2011, at approximately 4 p.m., Jesús Víctor Llano
Muñoz, 22, a taxi driver in Sabinas Hidalgo, Nuevo León, was
stopped at a Navy checkpoint that had been set up outside of a hotel where the
taxi company’s dispatch station is located.[33]
His father, also a taxi driver, was at the station at the time. When he saw the
Navy personnel remove his son from his taxi and load him into a Navy pick-up
truck, he approached and asked why they were detaining his son. An official
responded, “If he’s not involved in anything, I’ll hand him
over to you shortly.” [34] Minutes
later, the truck in which his son was being held drove off in a convoy of
approximately 20 vehicles. His family filed complaints with the state
prosecutor’s office in Sabinas Hidalgo that day, which said it had no
information about his case.[35] They
also inquired at the Navy base, which said they were not holding him.
Llano’s whereabouts remain unknown, and no members of the Navy have been
charged in the case.

Less than a week later—on June 28—René
Azael Jasso Maldonado, 26, another taxi driver, was arbitrarily detained in
the middle of the night at his family’s home in Sabinas Hidalgo, Nuevo
León.[36]
According to his mother, father, and brother—all of whom were home at the
time—10 armed, masked men carried out the raid wearing Navy uniforms. The
armed men entered the home without a warrant and first grabbed
René’s brother, Oziel Antonio Jasso Maldonado, holding him
facedown at gunpoint and yelling, “You are an halcón!”—the
name for people who work as lookouts for criminal groups—before another
man in Navy uniform entered and said Oziel was not the person they were looking
for. They then took René, who was in the next room, and loaded him into
an official Navy vehicle.[37] It was
the last time they saw him.

Enforced Disappearances by Local Police

The security force most frequently implicated in the
enforced disappearances documented by Human Rights Watch is local police. Human
Rights Watch found strong evidence in 95 cases that local police participated
directly or indirectly in enforced disappearances.[38]

For example, Israel Torres Lazarín, 21, worked
at a treatment center for drug addicts in Gómez Palacios, Durango. On
June 18, 2009, Torres was traveling together with five of his co-workers to
pick up a patient when their car was stopped by municipal police in Matamoros,
Coahuila.[39] Torres
communicated via radio with the director of the treatment center to notify him
that the group had been stopped outside of a Soriana department store (a chain
in Mexico) by police, who informed them that it was a “routine
check.”[40] The
director later told Torres’s mother that when he radioed back to Torres
three minutes later, the police were confiscating the detainees’ radio
and cellphones. When the director tried communicating by radio a third time,
there was no answer. The director immediately traveled to the location and
spoke to several people working nearby who said they had seen the police stop
the car and place six individuals in a truck marked with the insignia of the
municipal police.[41] Torres
and his five co-workers were never seen again.

In another case, gold dealers Eduardo Cortés
Cortés, 27, José Manuel Cortés Cortés,
21, Carlos Magallón Magallón, 30, and David
Magallón Magallón, 28, were abducted after traveling from
their homes in the town of Pajacuarán, Michoacan, to buy and sell gold
in the state of San Luis Potosí, as they did routinely as part of their
trade, according to the father of victims Eduardo and José Manual
Cortés Cortés.[42]
On the night of September 29, 2009, they arrived in Río Verde, San Luis
Potosí, where they checked into a hotel and called their families,
according to a preliminary investigation report by the San Luis Potosí
state prosecutor’s office.[43]

At 12:45 p.m. on September 30, David Magallón sent a
text message to his wife saying that they had been stopped by police in the
town of Cardenas, San Luis Potosí. “The police stopped us again
anything happens we are in Cardenas San Luis Potosí,” the message
read.[44]
Shortly thereafter David called his wife and told her that he and the others
had been detained and were being taken to the police station in Cardenas.[45]
Then the call cut out abruptly. When his wife called back, she was unable to
reach him.[46]
It was the last contact any of the families had with the four men.

Further evidence points
to the involvement of the police in the disappearance. Another gold dealer from
Pajacuarán—who was working in Cardenas with his business partner
at the time the four men disappeared—told the victims’ families he
had seen the victims being questioned by police on September 30.[47] He also said that he and his partner had been
robbed by local police the same day the men were “disappeared.” The
police officers warned him that they did not like people from Michoacán
and told him not to come back, he said. Although the victims’ relatives
provided this information to investigators in San Luis Potosí on
November 17, 2009, officials made no efforts to track down the alleged
witnesses, according to the families.[48] When Human Rights Watch reviewed the
investigation case file, there was no record of prosecutors having
interviewed—or attempted to find—this potential key witness. Police
in Cardenas denied ever having questioned the four men, and no officials have
been charged in the case.[49] In October 2011, the head of public security in Cardenas,
two police officers, and the chief of a police unit were detained and charged
with having worked with the Zetas to carry out robberies, acts of extortion,
and kidnappings.[50] Family members of the victims recognized one of
the people charged as the police officer who had threatened them when they had
traveled to Cardenas in October seeking information on their missing relatives.[51] They reported this to the public
prosecutor’s office, but at the time of writing, no officers had been
charged in the crime.[52]

Enforced Disappearances by Federal Police

Human Rights Watch found strong evidence that 13 enforced
disappearances were carried out by federal police, including that of
teenagers Roberto Iván Hernández García and Yudith
Yesenia Rueda García, both 17.[53]
Hernández and Rueda, boyfriend and girlfriend, were at the home of
Rueda’s grandmother on March 11, 2011, in Monterrey, Nuevo León,
when at approximately 9 p.m. armed men in masks broke down the door.[54]
The eight men were wearing uniforms that said “Federal Police,”
according to Rueda’s grandmother and aunt, who were both home at the
time, and said they were looking for someone nicknamed “Piña.”
When the family said there was no one by that name in the house, the men in
police uniforms brought a detainee in handcuffs into the home and walked him
over to Hernández and Rueda.[55] One of
the uniformed men gestured to Hernández and asked the detainee:
“Is it him?” “No,” the man answered. Then one uniformed
man said to another, “Well, if you want to, take them.” With that,
the officers removed Hernández and Rueda with force from the
house—beating Hernández as they went and pulling Rueda by her
hair—and loaded them into cars waiting outside.[56]
According to Rueda’s grandmother and aunt, there were two pick-up trucks and
a third vehicle marked with Federal Police insignia waiting outside, as well as
a taxi and an unmarked car. None of the cars had license plates, they said.
Rueda’s grandmother said she saw other detainees in the federal police
cars.[57]

Within an hour of their arbitrary detention, relatives of
Hernández and Rueda went to the federal police station in Monterrey to
inquire whether the two were being held there.[58] The
police officers who attended to them said, “We don’t know anything
about it. Detainees are not brought here. Go to the municipal police.”

Complicity between Security Forces and Organized
Crime in Disappearances

In more than 60 cases, Human Rights Watch found compelling
evidence of cooperation between security forces and organized crime in disappearances.
For example, 19 men[59]who worked for a construction company were
abducted in Pesquería, Nuevo León, on May 28, 2011.[60]
A neighbor who lived across the street from the small apartment building where
the workers were staying while they completed the project saw municipal police
arrive at the building immediately before the men were abducted, she told the
victims’ relatives.[61] Later,
police cars returned to the building carrying several of the workers, the
witness said, and the workers loaded valuables from the dormitories into the
police cars. Witnesses also reported seeing a large group of workers being held
outside of the municipal police station in Pesquería on May 28.[62]

That afternoon, the kidnappers contacted the construction
company’s foreman, Julio Rodríguez Torres, who had
been staying in a different hotel in Pesquería and was not with the
workers when they were abducted. The kidnappers told Rodríguez that if
he wanted to negotiate the release of his workers, he would need to meet them
the following morning at a bridge on the outskirts of town. An employee who
drove him to the location said that a municipal police car and a car without
license plates were waiting for him there.[63]
Rodríguez got into one of the cars, which then drove away. Neither he
nor the 19 workers were ever seen again.

Seventeen police from Pesquería were arrested on June
9, 2011, and placed under arraigo detention[64]
the following week for the abduction of the workers and collusion with
organized crime. At this writing, nine police officers had been charged in the
disappearance, while the investigation remained ongoing.[65]

In another example of collusion between authorities and
organized crime, on December 27, 2011, brothers José Carlos and Juan
Rogelio Macías Herrera, 39 and 37—who ran a business selling
used cars—were driving between the municipalities of Apodaca and
Juárez in Nuevo León when they were detained at a police
checkpoint.[66] The
wife of one of the brothers lived along the road where police had set up the
checkpoint. At 4:30 p.m., she said, she saw the two men being driven in the
back of a Juárez municipal police car, which was being followed by
another police car.[67] She saw
the numbers of the two patrol units and wrote them down. When the brothers did
not return home within several hours, relatives went to the Juárez
municipal police station to ask if they were being held. The police denied any
knowledge of their detention, members of the family said.

On January 3, 2012, five men, including three members of the
Juárez police, were detained for kidnapping the two men.[68]
In statements given by the police officers to prosecutors, they said they had
carried out the detention “under orders” of a local crime boss, and
handcuffed the brothers “ to part of the holding pen of the police car,
and then we took them to a car lot…where they were held for more time
until they were transferred to an unknown place.”[69]
Five men were charged with illegal detention with the aim of kidnapping, three
of whom were also charged with robbery.[70]
According to the statements of the accused police officers, the brothers were
handed over to a leader of a local cell of the Zetas.[71]
Their whereabouts remain unknown.

Police from Juárez were also implicated in
collaborating with organized crime in the disappearances of Israel Arenas
Durán, 17, Adrián Nava Cid, and brothers Gabriel
and Reynaldo García Álvarez—who worked at a plant
nursery in Juárez, Nuevo León. The four young men disappeared on
the night of June 17, 2011, after going for drinks at a bar after work.[72]
Israel called his younger brother, Irving, from the bar to ask him to bring
money for the bill.[73] On the
drive there, Irving saw his brother’s car pulled over along the shoulder
of the road, with a transit police car behind it. As Irving approached, he saw
police loading his brother, in handcuffs, into the back of police car, unit
131. Irving asked one of the officers why the man was being detained, and in
response the officer asked if Irving knew the man. When Irving answered that he
did not (out of fear), the officer told him to go away.

Irving rushed home and told his parents what he had seen,
and then the three set out together for the municipal police station in
Juárez. The police who attended to them denied that officers had
detained anyone named Israel Arenas. Yet while they waited, Irving saw one of
the police officers who had detained his brother walk through the station. He
also spotted the police car he had seen his brother loaded into—unit
131—parked outside the station. The following morning, the family
returned to the police station but police continued to deny any knowledge of
Israel’s detention, and recommended they check other police stations in
the area. However, the family spotted Israel’s truck in an impounded car
lot next to the station, and owners told the family it had been left there by
transit police.

When the family returned to the Juárez transit police
station a third time, an official in plainclothes who identified himself as a
commander attended to them. He said Israel had been detained for crashing into
a police vehicle and was being held in the station. He told Israel’s
parents that officers were knocking him around a bit, but that he would be
released the following afternoon.[74] Before
the family left, according to Irving, the plainclothes officer took him aside
and said, “You already know what happens to those who speak too
much.”[75] Irving
took the warning as a threat not to say that he had seen the police detain his
brother.

When the family returned the next day, officials told them
that—contrary to the information they had been given the day
before—Israel had never been detained. Police also said no one with the
characteristics of the man they spoke with the day before worked for the
police.[76] On June
24, Israel’s father spotted his son’s truck on the road and
followed it to a residential address, which he reported to police. The driver
turned out to be a former judicial police officer.

Eight men from León, Guanajuato—José
Diego Cordero Anguiano, 47; Juan Diego Cordero Valdivia, 22;
Ernesto Cordero Anguiano, 37; Alán Josué Bocanegra
García, 19; Sergio Sánchez Pérez, 32; Mario
Alberto Reyes, 26; José Javier Martínez, 46;
Héctor González Cervantes, 37—were illegally detained
on December 6, 2011 by local police in the municipality of Joaquín
Amaro, Zacatecas, as they returned from a hunting trip.[77]
According to two individuals who were part of the group of hunters and managed
to escape their captors, the group was detained at approximately 6 p.m. on
December 6, as they drove through Joaquín Amaro. Municipal police
officers from Joaquín Amaro and Tabasco (another municipality in
Zacatecas) took part in their detention, the survivors said.[78]
The police confiscated their mobile phones and weapons and took them to the
police station, where they blindfolded them, beat them, and accused them of
belonging to a criminal group that had come to take over new territory.[79]

At approximately 11 p.m., the
police handed the hunters over to a group of armed men in six SUVs near a gas
station in Fresnillo, Zacatecas.[80]
(One of the abducted hunters escaped, while another—a teenager—was
released.) The handover of the hunters was captured on the gas station’s
security cameras, footage from which shows police handing the abducted men over
to men waiting in other vehicles.[81]
Zacatecas’s attorney general later said that police officers admitted to
prosecutors to having illegally detained the hunters and handing them over to
“organized crime.”[82]
Eight police officers were charged by state prosecutors on January 18, 2011,
for kidnapping compounded with robbery and ties to organized crime. At this
writing, according to local human rights defenders, the police had also been
charged by federal prosecutors with colluding with organized crime and were
awaiting trial.[83]

Investigative Failures

Failure by Authorities to Intervene During and
Immediately Following Abductions

In several cases,
victims’ families told Human Rights Watch that they sought help from
authorities when someone was taken against their will or immediately
afterwards, a period critical to obtaining information on the fate of victim,
preventing murder, and finding those responsible. In each case, however,
authorities either did not respond or turned them away.

For example, on the afternoon of October 26, 2008,
approximately five unmarked SUVs blocked off the street where the Vega family
lived, Dania Vega (pseudonym) told Human Rights Watch.[84]
Masked men armed with large weapons emerged from the cars and forced their way
into the home, abducting Dania’s husband and father, ages 33 and
59 respectively. Vega hid in the bathroom with her children and dialed
066—the telephone number used to report emergencies, such as fires and
robberies, to authorities—to report the abduction in progress. She
explained what was happening as the armed men went from room to room, going
through the family’s belongings. When she finished explaining what was
happening, the official on the line told her, “If they are already there,
we cannot do anything for you.”[85]

As soon as the armed men had left the home, Vega ran toward
the center of Matamoros, which was only a few blocks away, and came across a
municipal police car. She told the officers that her husband and father had
just been abducted, described the SUVs that had just taken them, and asked the
police to pursue the vehicles. The officers responded that they were not
responsible for what happened in that part of the town and could not leave the
location where they had been posted. She said the officers did not even report
the crime to other units over their radios.[86]

The family of Iván Baruch Núñez
Mendieta, 31, also found authorities unwilling to act in real time when
presented with credible evidence of a disappearance.[87]
Núñez went to a bar in Torreón, Coahuila, with several
friends on August 6, 2011, and called his wife around 3 a.m. to say he was
leaving. When he did not arrive home within several hours, his wife called
several of his friends. One told her that the bouncers had prevented Núñez
from leaving the bar after he had an argument with a waiter.[88]

When Núñez still had not returned by the
morning of August 7, several of his relatives went to the bar, but armed guards
at the door would not let them go inside. One of the guards told the family, “If
you are looking for the one in the Santos jersey”—a soccer jersey
Núñez was wearing the night before—“he will show up
in two or three days,” implying that they knew who he was and where he
had been taken.[89] This
comment, together with the guards’ refusal to let the family enter the
bar, led them to suspect he might still be inside. As a result, a relative went
to look for help and found a patrol unit several blocks away. But when he told
the two police officers what had happened, the officers said that they were
assigned to a specific location and could not leave their post.[90]
Members of the family said that when they went to the police station, officers
told them they would first need to obtain a search warrant before going to the
bar, which could take days or even weeks. Núñez was never seen
again. In April 2012, his relatives told Human Rights Watch that, according to
their conversations with investigators assigned to the case, neither police nor
prosecutors had ever inspected the bar.

Failure to Immediately Search for Victims or Open
Investigations

Human Rights Watch found that prosecutors routinely fail to
conduct preliminary inquiries or open investigations immediately after
disappearances are reported, a period that the UN Working Group on Enforced or
Involuntary Disappearances (hereafter the UN Working Group on Enforced Disappearances)
defines as “crucial to obtaining information on the fate of enforced
disappearance and preventing murder.”[91] Such
delays may result in irrecoverable losses of key evidence, and may discourage
families from returning at a later time to report disappearances.

Scores of families said
that when they went to report a disappearance, prosecutors and police told them
that a person needed to have been missing for 72 hours before a complaint could
be filed. State prosecutors in Coahuila told Human Rights Watch that, as
recently as 2011, official documents had been circulated to state justice and
law enforcement officials instructing them to wait 72 hours before opening
investigations into disappearances.[92] While they said such memos are no longer in circulation,
they conceded that many prosecutors and police continue this practice when
families report disappearances.

In other cases, prosecutors told families the missing person
had most likely been detained by security forces, and would eventually be handed
over to justice officials or released without charge. In the meantime,
prosecutors told families, it was not worth opening an investigation. By law,
security forces are required to immediately hand over detainees to prosecutors.
In addition, prosecutors have a duty to investigate and prosecute security
forces that fail to comply with this requirement, which is critical for
respecting detainees’ due process rights.[93]

On December 29, 2009, at approximately 8 p.m., according to
witnesses, soldiers detained Nitza Paola Alvarado Espinoza, 31, and
José Ángel Alvarado Herrera, 30, as they were driving in
Buenaventura, Chihuahua.[94] Around
10 p.m., soldiers forcibly entered the home of Nitza Paola and José
Ángel’s cousins and arbitrarily detained Irene Rocío Alvarado
Reyes, 18, according to Irene Rocío’s mother.[95]
On December 30, Nitza’s sister went to the state judicial police in Casas
Grandes to inquire about her missing relatives. Upon arriving, she noticed
José Ángel’s car parked in a lot attached to the station.
When she asked the judicial police officer attending her why the vehicle was
there, he said the report accompanying the vehicle indicated that it had been
left there by the Army. The same report, the officer told her, said that the
Army had detained Nitza Paola and José Ángel, who had been in the
car at the time. (A subsequent letter from the judicial police agent assigned
to the investigation confirmed that the victims’ car was on the premises
of the police station shortly after the disappearance.[96])
Nitza’s sister asked the officer if he was certain the Army had carried
out the detentions, to which he replied he was “pretty sure, because I
have a section that lists the names of your relatives.”[97]

From the judicial police station, Nitza’s sister went
directly to the state prosecutor’s office in Casas Grandes to file a
report.[98]
However, when she met with a state prosecutor, he refused to register the case,
telling her instead that she had to go to the state prosecutor’s office
in the neighboring municipality of Buenaventura. When she arrived there, she
was told that there was no prosecutor who could attend to her.[99]

José Ángel’s brother encountered similar
resistance convincing authorities to open an investigation into the
disappearance. Like Nitza’s sister, he also went to the state
prosecutor’s office to file a complaint on November 30, where a judicial
police agent told him that the three civilians were being held on the 35th
infantry battalion in Nuevo Casas Grandes, Chihuahua. However, according to José
Ángel, the agent told him the family should wait several days before
taking any action.[100]
“Be patient,” the officer said, “we know that the Army
detained them.” More than two years later, the fate of the three victims
remains unknown. A subsequent investigation by the National Human Rights
Commission concluded that they had been “disappeared” by the
military.[101]

The failure to immediately search for victims and open
investigations was also evidenced in authorities’ response to 20
families in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, who said their relatives had been
arbitrarily detained by members of the Navy on June 4 and 5, 2011. The
victims’ families went to the federal prosecutor’s office to report
the cases immediately after their relatives were arbitrarily detained.[102]
(For a more detailed summary of these cases, see previous chapter,
“Enforced Disappearances by the Navy.”) However, federal
prosecutors told families they could not register a formal complaint until 72
hours after the victims had gone missing, according to several of the families
and a human rights defender who accompanied them to the meetings.[103]
Federal prosecutors also refused to accompany families to the neighboring Navy
base where many believed their relatives were being held incommunicado.[104]
By the time federal prosecutors were willing to attend to the relatives and
register their cases on June 7, at least six families who had originally tried
to report disappearances did not return to file official complaints.[105]
The fact that families did not return suggests that the dilatory measures of
the federal prosecutor’s office discouraged victims’ families from
filing complaints.

Other prosecutors gave different pretexts for refusing to
open investigations or take victims’ testimony. For example, in November
2011, 23 undocumented Central American migrants making their way to the
United States were abducted by armed men in Coahuila.[106]
According to the testimonies of three migrants who escaped, the armed men
stopped a train the victims were riding and then forced the migrants into
pick-up trucks. One of the migrants who escaped immediately filed a formal
complaint with the federal prosecutor’s office in Saltillo, Coahuila.[107]
Weeks later, another of the migrants who had escaped—and who had
previously had been too afraid to come forward—decided that he too wanted
to file an official complaint. However, when he arrived at the federal prosecutor’s
office to give his testimony with a human rights defender, the prosecutor said
the defender was not allowed to be present in the meeting.[108]
When the defender insisted that he had a right to accompany the migrant, the
prosecutor “grew angry that [he] was there and scolded [him].”[109]
Then the prosecutor said she no longer wanted to take the migrant’s
testimony and turned him and the defender away.[110]

The failure to promptly open investigations into the
disappearances of undocumented migrants can be especially harmful when
witnesses are fellow migrants, because they are likely to leave the places
where abuses have occurred within a short period of time due to their
transitory status. They are also more reluctant to speak with authorities, out
of fear that authorities will deport them for having entered Mexico without
authorization, according to rights defenders in migrant shelters.[111]
These investigative shortcomings exacerbate the exposure undocumented migrants
already face—people who the UN Working Group on Enforced Disappearances
said “are particularly vulnerable to enforced disappearances due to their
undocumented status and the lack of financial resources, effective laws,
protection schemes, and judicial remedies available to them.”[112]

Blaming the Victim

Prosecutors have an obligation to conduct prompt, thorough,
and impartial investigations into every disappearance, which necessitates
pursuing various lines of inquiry and exploring a range of motives. Given that
cartels have committed serious crimes in Mexico in recent years, including many
disappearances, it is reasonable for prosecutors to investigate the possibility
that the perpetrators of such crimes are members of criminal groups. It is also
reasonable to examine the background of the victim for information relevant to
his whereabouts or possible motives for his abduction.

However, according to nearly every family interviewed by
Human Rights Watch, law enforcement and prosecutors’ reflexive assumption
in disappearance cases is that the victim was targeted for belonging to a
criminal group. Authorities repeatedly embraced this theory, and indeed often
voiced it to families, before undertaking a preliminary investigation into the
case. Furthermore, the presumption of the victim’s criminal ties was
often used by prosecutors to justify not investigating a disappearance, under
the flawed logic that a victim’s (alleged) criminal involvement relieves
the state of its duty to investigate crimes against them. Regardless of the
victim’s history, of course, the state has a responsibility to
investigate all disappearances. Instead, victims’ families often find
themselves with the burden of proving the victim’s innocence in order to
persuade prosecutors to investigate.

When the relatives of Iván Baruch
Núñez Mendieta went to authorities to report that he had been
detained in Torreón, Coahuila, in August 2011, and had not been seen
since, judicial police told them, “It’s because he was selling
drugs. Don’t look for him.”[113] (For a
more detailed summary of Núñez Mendieta’s case, see
previous chapter “Failure by Authorities to Intervene During and
Immediately Following Abductions.”) According to the family, officials
made these comments before the family had provided any of the details of his
case—Núñez had gone missing after visiting a bar with
friends from work—and in spite of having made no efforts to investigate
what had happened.[114] Such
statements, according to scores of families interviewed by Human Rights Watch,
leave them feeling government officials have a strong bias against their family
members, making them fearful and reluctant to collaborate with investigators.

The mother of Hugo Marcelino González Salazar,
24, who disappeared on July 20, 2009, in Torreón, Coahuila, said that
when she reported his case, the investigator began his questioning by asking if
her son had any “vices.”[115] When
his mother said his only vice was smoking cigarettes, the investigator told her
that “one vice leads to another” and that her son had probably been
a drug addict, which had led to his disappearance. Brothers Gustavo and
Fernando Moreno Velarde (pseudonyms)—27 and 21, a mine worker and a
repairman, respectively—were abducted from outside their mother’s
home in Torreón, Coahuila, on June 14, 2010, by eight armed men.[116]
A few hours before their kidnapping, the brothers had a heated argument outside
their home with a taxi driver nicknamed “El Doce,” according to
their mother, who witnessed the quarrel outside of her home. However, when the
mother pressed judicial police to question “El Doce,” the head of
the police unit responded, “Get that theory out of your head. This
happened because [your sons] were involved in something bad.”[117]
When the mother responded that her sons had led “honest, hard-working
lives,” the official responded, “Kids in the house are one thing.
When they leave the house, they are another.”

The mother of Oscar Germán Herrera Rocha, who
disappeared with three other men on a business trip to Coahuila in June 2009,
said that when she reported his disappearance to a delegate from the federal
prosecutor’s office, his first reaction was, “Nothing happens to
common people—only to people who have ties.”[118]
Herrera’s mother said the investigator questioned her at length about her
son’s business partners, their line of work, and potential criminal ties.
At the same time, the investigator asked no questions about the possible
involvement of the security forces in his disappearance, despite the fact that
Herrera and the other men had called their wives shortly before disappearing to
say local police had stopped them.[119] A
subsequent investigation by prosecutors—which was driven significantly by
Herrera’s mother—later revealed that municipal police had
arbitrarily detained him and his co-workers.[120]

Unfounded Presumptions about Victim’s
Whereabouts

As another pretext for not opening an investigation,
officials sometimes suggest without evidence that the victim has not
disappeared. Prosecutors and law enforcement officials in several cases
reflexively suggested to spouses and partners that the victim left voluntarily
because he or she was probably unhappy in the relationship, or must have run
off with another lover, a particularly hurtful form of speculation. For
example, Mónica Isabel Esquivel Castillo, 22, a private security
guard at a factory in Saltillo, Coahuila with two daughters never returned home
from work on September 12, 2011. When her mother reported her missing the
following day, judicial police told her, “Don’t worry too much, she
is likely off with a lover.”[121] When
the mother answered that her daughter always called to let her know when she
was going to be late, officials ignored her. An official investigation into
Esquivel’s disappearance was not opened until September 20—one week
after her mother attempted to file a report—when the victim’s
father returned to the prosecutor’s office and demanded they investigate
the case.[122] When
he inquired about his wife’s complaint, he was told there was none on
file. Not only had authorities dismissed the possibility that Esquivel had
disappeared, but they also had failed to open an investigation. Sensing that
prosecutors were doing nothing to search for her daughter, Esquivel’s
mother began to investigate the case herself. One of her daughter’s
co-workers eventually confided in her that he had seen Esquivel being forced
into a vehicle as she left work on September 12. The co-worker recognized the two men who took her as employees at the factory where he and Esquivel
worked as guards. He told the mother that prosecutors had never interviewed
him, even though he was working with Esquivel the night she disappeared.[123]
Esquivel has not been seen since that day.

The wife of Sebastián Pérez (pseudonym),
who disappeared in Coahuila in August 2011, said that when she reported her
husband as missing, a judicial police agent asked her how long she had been
married. When she answered 10 years, the agent told her that after ten years
her husband would no longer have been faithful to her. “He took off with
[another] woman,” the agent said. “Give up looking for him.”[124]
She said officers reached this conclusion before asking any other questions
regarding where he had been before he disappeared, and in spite of the fact
several of her husband’s friends had seen him be abducted.

Cell phones, radio signals, and bank records offer a
critical tool to help investigators determine the fate of the disappeared, in
particular in the immediate aftermath of disappearances. However, Human Rights
Watch found that investigators routinely waited weeks, months, or even years
before soliciting the cell phone, radio, or banking records of victims, despite
evidence that accounts continued to be used and despite persistent requests
from families to follow these leads. Investigators also consistently failed to
seek footage in a timely fashion from public or private surveillance cameras
that may have provided relevant leads. By the time officials requested such
footage, it usually had been deleted because so much time had elapsed.

In the majority of cases we documented, victims were
carrying cell phones or two-way radios (commonly referred to as Nextels
in Mexico, from the name of one of the providers) at the time of their
disappearances. Often, these devices continued to receive calls, and in some
cases were answered by unidentified individuals, after victims had been
abducted. In other cases, families obtained bank records indicating that money
was being withdrawn from victims’ bank accounts at regular intervals for
weeks after their disappearances. Yet when families reported this information
to authorities, they said investigators were slow to act on it, if they acted
at all. Rather, it was often victims’ families who sought cell phone
records to determine the location of phone and radio signals, as well as ATM
locations of withdrawals, which entailed overcoming significant obstacles
because many companies are reluctant to provide information to anyone other
than the primary account holder. Even when families provided investigators with
actionable information such as the location of a victim’s cell phone,
authorities routinely failed to act on it.

For example, sisters Perla Liliana Pecina Riojas, 29,
and Elsa Judith Pecina Riojas, 27, were abducted from their home in
Saltillo, Coahuila, on November 15, 2011, together with Elsa’s husband,
Wilfredo Álvarez Valdez, 32, and their two-year-old son.[125]
When the victims’ families filed a formal complaint with state
prosecutors on November 23, they informed investigators that—at that
time—the victims’ cell phones and ATM cards continued to be used.[126]
Perla Liliana Pecina’s bank card was used 21 times in the month of
December, including six withdrawals between December 4 and 19 at the same ATM
location, according to bank records her family showed to Human Rights Watch,
and which they had shared with prosecutors.[127]
Yet prosecutors and law enforcement officials did not carry out any
surveillance on the ATM location, acquire security camera footage from the ATM
in a timely manner, or interview people who worked in the area.[128]
On December 23, 2011, all use of the victims’ cell phones and bank cards
ceased.

Authorities also failed
to act for months on information that could have helped find Gonzalo Ribera
Moncada, 41, an auto mechanic, and Horacio Sandoval Torres, 40, a
construction worker. On February 24, 2011, Ribera’s father was
arbitrarily detained from the car repair shop where he worked in Monterrey,
Nuevo León. The armed men who took him were wearing state judicial
police uniforms, his co-workers later informed his family.[129] Shortly thereafter, Ribera received a call from
kidnappers saying that they would release his father in exchange for a
car—a deal he accepted. On February 28, the kidnappers instructed Ribera to drive the car to the neighboring city of Guadalupe and then wait for
instructions about a specific drop off location. His brother-in-law, Horacio
Sandoval Torres, accompanied him on the trip.[130] The men never returned from the journey to hand
over the car.

Ribera had been carrying a Nextel on the trip, which emitted
a GPS signal that his family began to trace following his disappearance.[131]
Tracking the signal over several days, the family noticed that it was most
frequently emanating from a one-block radius in Guadalupe, where they suspected
Ribera and Sandoval were being held. On March 1, the family handed this
information over to Navy officials at a nearby base. They returned days later
to provide updated locations emitted from the Nextel, but the Navy officials
did nothing to investigate the locations from which the GPS signal was most
frequently being emitted.[132]
Nor did Navy officials transmit the information provided by the family to the
public prosecutor’s office, which is supposed to investigate such cases.
In July, discouraged by the lack of action taken by the Navy, the family reported
the disappearances to the prosecutor’s office, and provided them with
information on the Nextel device, which continued to emit a signal that the
family was tracking.[133]
By late September 2011, the family said, the Nextel stopped emitting a GPS
signal. Prosecutors had never once investigated the locations of Ribera’s
Nextel, members of the family said.

The family of Agnolo Pabel Medina Flores, 32, who was
abducted by armed men on August 2, 2010, found authorities similarly
unresponsive when they provided information that could have led to finding him
or the people who took him. Medina, was taken from his home in Guadalupe, Nuevo
León, by approximately 20 armed men in camouflage on August 2, 2010,
members of his family told Human Rights Watch.[134]
He was carrying a Nextel phone at the time, which his captors used to communicate
with his family to demand ransom. His family traced the GPS signal of the
Nextel and handed the coordinates over to the military, police, and
prosecutors, the victim’s mother told Human Rights Watch, yet none of
them took action for months. In a complaint with state prosecutors, the
victim’s brother said that on one occasion he traveled to the location
from which the GPS signal was being emitted, and arrived at a home where he saw
one of the pick-up trucks that had participated in his brother’s abduction.
As a result, “he contacted the Army and reported the situation, but no
authority turned up” to investigate the location—a failure to act
on real-time information that he said was repeated many times.[135]

Negligence, Delays, Errors, and Fabrications

In nearly all of the disappearance cases we documented, we
found compelling evidence that authorities had failed to carry out basic
investigative steps that may have helped locate victims of disappearances or
the individuals responsible for them. Among the most common investigative
lapses documented by Human Rights Watch were: failing to interview the
victims’ family members, eyewitnesses, co-workers, or others who may have
provided relevant leads and information; failing to interview possible suspects
identified by victims’ families; failing to pursue obvious investigative
leads, such as obtaining the names of police or soldiers assigned to units
identified by witnesses; and failing to visit the scene of the crime to collect
evidence.

Human Rights Watch found that even in those cases where
justice officials carried out basic investigative steps, they often waited so
long that possible leads were lost. Witnesses moved to different places,
families lost trust in prosecutors and no longer wanted to cooperate with
investigations, and key evidence vanished. Justice officials also misplaced key
evidence, such as DNA samples from victims’ relatives and transcripts of
testimony, and in several instances even lost entire case files. In addition,
in reviewing official documents provided by victims’ families, Human
Rights Watch found evidence of prosecutors making mistakes in recording
critical information, such as confusing the chronology of events or the names
of victims, which likely further undermined the investigations. In some cases,
prosecutors and members of security forces fabricated evidence, such as
claiming they had conducted interviews that never occurred.

For example, as
detailed below, authorities investigating the disappearances of
Isaías Uribe Hernández and Juan Pablo Alvarado Oliveros made
a series of errors, including: failing to promptly secure the crime scene,
which allowed crucial evidence to be damaged and removed; refusing to open a
prompt investigation into the crime; passing the case back and forth between
state and federal prosecutors; misplacing key evidence; failing to conduct
adequate forensic analysis; and, in one instance, even lying about having
conducted an interview or at least mistaking the identity of an interviewee in official
records.

Uribe Hernández
and Alvarado Oliveros, both age 30, worked at the same veterinary clinic in
Torreón, Coahuila. On April 4, 2009, they went out in Alvarado
Oliveros’s pick-up truck—which bore the name of the clinic where
they worked—at approximately 10:30 p.m., according to Uribe
Hernández’s wife.[136] They stopped by the home of Alvarado
Oliveros’s friend, Leopoldo Gerardo Villa Sifuentes, to invite him to
drinks, but he said he was staying in for the night with his family, according
to testimony Villa Sifuentes later gave to state prosecutors.[137] At approximately 2:30 am, Villa Sifuentes heard
gunshots outside of his home. Five to ten minutes later, after the shooting
stopped, he said, “I leaned out the window and realized that there were
numerous soldiers wearing masks walking around the street, and I say that they
were soldiers because they were traveling in trucks that were military green
and carrying guns three times the size of normal ones…and when one of the
masked soldiers spotted me he pointed his flashlight at my face and told me to
go inside.”[138]

Uribe Hernández and Alvarado Oliveros did not return
home that night, and their families began to search for them the following
morning.[139] Their families heard from
neighbors that there had been a shootout in the neighborhood during the
previous night, so Uribe Hernández’s father-in-law went to the
place the shootout had occurred, where he found Alvarado Oliveros’s
pick-up riddled with gunshots. Bloodstains marked the passenger seat and two
doors.[140] One
neighbor told the victims’ families that she had seen soldiers in the
street after the shootout carrying an individual out of the pick-up, who was
not moving at the time, and escorting another individual at gunpoint. In a
later inquiry by the National Human Rights Commission, a neighbor testified to
seeing soldiers in the street immediately after the shootout.[141]

The victims’ families reported a litany of
investigative lapses by justice officials. To begin with, officials did not
secure the crime scene until approximately 12:30 p.m. on April 5, roughly 10
hours after the shootout occurred, despite the fact that it had been reported
to authorities by various neighbors while it was occurring.[142]
By the time Uribe Hernández’s father-in-law arrived at the scene,
neighbors were touching the vehicle and stepping on and removing bullet casings
in the street—tampering that disrupts the ability of forensic
investigators to collect evidence and reconstruct the incident.

That afternoon, family members went to the state
prosecutor’s office to file an official report on the disappearances,[143]
but were told that because the case allegedly involved the military, it fell
under federal jurisdiction.[144]
However, when the families went to the federal prosecutor’s office, they
were told that unless witnesses could provide identification numbers for the
Army units involved, federal officials could not open an investigation.[145]
Federal prosecutors did not open an investigation into the case until April 14,
2009, nine days after the incident occurred.[146]

The investigation was further undermined by federal and
state prosecutors transferring responsibility for the case back and forth. For
example, federal prosecutors transferred the case to state prosecutors on June
10, 2009.[147] As
justification, the federal prosecutors argued that—in spite of witness
testimony putting the military at the scene of the crime—“it can be
deduced that it is improbable that the Mexican Army was involved in this
incident.” Federal prosecutors offered no explanation for how they made
this “deduction,” which contradicted the evidence cited. After
transferring the investigation between several different sub-units within the
state prosecutor’s office, in June 2010 the state prosecutor’s
office handed the case back to the federal prosecutor’s office, arguing
that the military’s possible involvement placed the case under federal
jurisdiction, according to victims’ families and local human rights
defenders working on the case.[148]

Investigators also
misplaced key evidence in the case. State justice officials collected 39 bullet
shells at the scene of the crime on April 5.[149] The inspection of shell casings is relevant to
determining the participation of the Army in the incident because certain
bullets are used exclusively by the Armed Forces, and thus could help determine
whether members of the military participated in the shootout. However, when
state prosecutors handed the investigation over to their federal counterparts,
they did not hand over the shells found at the crime scene. Furthermore,
although the shells were mentioned in the state prosecutors’ case file,
federal prosecutors did not realize they were missing. Rather, it was the
victims’ families who discovered that they were missing, when they asked to
review the federal prosecutors’ case file. Upon realizing that the shells
were not there, Uribe Hernández’s wife filed an official
complaint demanding state prosecutors hand over the shells to federal
investigators. “[Federal prosecutors] have informed me that there are no
shells here, and that no official handed over a single shell,” she
declared.[150] Months later, federal prosecutors told the
families the shell casings had been sent to another state for special tests.[151] When Human Rights Watch met with the
victims’ families and local human rights defenders working on the case in
April 2012, the shells had still not been returned to the case file, nor had
any information come back from the alleged special tests.

Victims’ families repeatedly requested that
prosecutors conduct DNA analysis of the blood stains found in the interior of
the victims’ pick-up truck in order to determine whether the blood came
from one or both of the disappeared men. An examination by state forensic
officials confirmed that blood was found in five locations in the car. Yet the
analysis only tested whether the blood was human blood—concluding that
“all of the stains correspond to human blood”[152]—and did not test
whether the blood matched the DNA of the relatives of the disappeared. To date,
neither federal nor state officials have conducted these tests on the blood,
according to the victims’ families.[153]

Investigators also fabricated evidence, lying about having
conducted an interview with one relative that never occurred. An official
document in the federal prosecutor’s case file claims that federal
judicial police had visited Uribe Hernández’s home in August 2010
and interviewed the victim’s father, Sergio Uribe Loyo.[154]
However, Uribe Hernández’s family said this interview never
occurred. As proof, members of the family pointed out that while judicial
police claimed they interviewed Uribe’s father at his home in Coahuila,
Uribe’s father lives in the state of Oaxaca. Furthermore, Uribe’s
father was in Oaxaca at the time police claimed the interview took place in
Coahuila.[155]

According to the victims’ families, prosecutors also
failed to pursue other basic investigative leads, such as interviewing
neighbors who lived on the street where the shootout occurred and who may have
witnessed the incident or its aftermath. Nor have federal or state prosecutors
sought to interview members of the military, despite the fact that the Army
admitted to having been in the neighborhood where the shootout occurred in the
early hours of April 5.[156] In the
military’s account, which was submitted to the Ministry of the Interior
in response to a request for information regarding its movements in
Torreón at the time the incident occurred, the Army said it dispatched
units to the area after receiving reports of gunshots and explosions. The Army
said it encountered the bullet-riddled truck, empty, but made no mention of
securing the crime scene or notifying justice officials.[157]

Another case where prosecutors failed to carry out basic
investigative steps was that of Gerardo Villasana, 21, a welder from
Torreón, Coahuila. Villasana went out to a bar with two friends on
December 12, 2008, and did not return that night to his parents’ home,
where he lived.[158] When
Villasana had still not come home by the next morning, his mother began to
contact his friends to ask if they knew what had happened to him. She also
filed a formal report of his disappearance with the state prosecutor’s
office on December 16, but she said prosecutors did next to nothing to
investigate.[159]
Through her own investigation, she tracked down one of the two friends who had
been with Villasana the night he disappeared. He told her that the three had
gotten into a fight with another group of men at the bar, and that he had been
badly wounded and needed to be taken to a hospital. He did not know what had
happened to Villasana, or the third friend who had been with them that night,
who was also missing.

Another friend of Villasana’s told his mother that he
had gone to the bar where the fight took place to speak with the workers there.[160]
One of the bar’s employees told him that Villasana and his friend had
been abducted as they left the bar, and forced into black pick-up trucks. The
trucks were accompanied by two pick-ups bearing the insignia of the Federal
Police, the bar employee said. Villasana’s mother passed along this
information to the investigator handling the case and encouraged him to go to
the bar. The investigator responded that it was too dangerous for him to go to
the neighborhood where the bar was located, let alone visit the bar. He said
that if the mother wanted more information, she should go there herself.[161]

In the case of Daniel Cantú Iris, the
omissions, errors, and delays stretched over several years and several
different prosecutors.[162] Cantú,
23, worked for a mining company in Torreón. At approximately 9 a.m. on
February 21, 2007, he set out in a car for a mine in Paredón, Coahuila,
with the company’s owner, Héctor Francisco León
García, and the owner’s cousin, José Ángel
Esparza León. The men never arrived at their destination.
Cantú’s father filed an official complaint on February 26, 2007,
and members of his family called prosecutors regularly to see what progress had
been made.[163]

The first investigator assigned to the case, retired Army
lieutenant colonel Aurelio Macías García, claimed the police were
conducting a wide range of interviews and had undertaken several raids to
search for Cantú and the others, Cantú’s mother told Human
Rights Watch. Macías died in July 2008 and the investigation was
assigned to a different investigator. Cantú’s relatives assumed
prosecutors were still investigating. However, when Cantú’s mother
asked—on the recommendation of local human rights defenders—to
review the prosecutor’s case file in May 2010, she found that it was
virtually empty. During the period Macías was in charge, the only
documents assembled in the case file were the family’s initial complaint
and 13 pages of requests for Cantú’s cell phone records.[164]
When she asked officials whether there were any other documents from this
period, they said that Macías’s wife had taken many of his case
files after he died, and that she may have taken Cantú’s. Indeed,
the only steps investigators took from February 2007 through May 2010 to search
for the victims were interviewing a friend of Cantú and issuing
bulletins to medical and law enforcement officials to look for the missing
people and their stolen vehicle, according to a report prepared by the director
of the investigations in Coahuila.[165] She
also discovered that the investigations into the disappearance of the three
victims had been separated into three separate investigations, each of which
was being handled by a different prosecutor, in spite of the clear tie between
the cases.[166]

State investigators also misplaced DNA evidence in the case.
Cantú’s mother was one of scores of relatives of the disappeared
in Coahuila who provided a DNA sample to state authorities in 2009.[167]
Yet when she reviewed her son’s case file in May 2010, it did not contain
any information about her DNA sample. Asked where it had gone, state
prosecutors were unable to provide an explanation.[168]
According to local human rights defenders working with families in Coahuila,
Cantú’s mother’s DNA sample was one of dozens collected in
2009 that later vanished from case files.[169]

How Failure to Investigate Contributes Directly to
More Disappearances

In several cases, Human Rights Watch found evidence
suggesting that the same officials—often in collaboration with criminal
groups—were responsible for carrying out multiple disappearances in separate
incidents. The repeated involvement of the same perpetrators in these crimes highlights
one of the consequences of inadequate investigations by justice officials and
law enforcement: when prosecutors fail to find those responsible for crimes,
they may fail to prevent future crimes from occurring.

Human Rights Watch found strong
evidence that authorities’ poor response to a kidnapping and their unwillingness
to act on credible information of additional imminent abductions contributed to
the disappearance of four people. David Ibarra Ovalle, 56, who owns a
transportation company, and his wife, Virginia Buenrostro Romero, 52,
were kidnapped by armed men on November 13, 2010, at their ranch in Cadereyta,
Nuevo León.[170]
The kidnappers were transporting Ibarra and Buenrostro in a car at
approximately 2 p.m. on November 15 when they passed an Army convoy, and a
firefight broke out. Two of the kidnappers were killed and others escaped. They
left behind the husband and wife, blindfolded and handcuffed, in the back of
the car.

Rather than free the couple,
however, soldiers left their handcuffs on and made them wait roughly five hours
while they secured the crime scene.[171]
As they sat there, the husband and wife begged the Army to send soldiers to
their home. Some of the kidnappers were still hiding out there, they said, and
Ibarra and Buenrostro feared that their children might go looking for them and
themselves be kidnapped. (The couple had been out of touch with their children
for two days—unusual for their family—and suspected their children
would go to the ranch.)

However, soldiers told the
family they could not go to the ranch in Cadereyta without orders, and instead
transported the husband and wife to the prosecutor’s office.[172] Upon arriving there that night, Ibarra and Buenrostro
again explained they were victims, and pleaded with federal prosecutors to send
police to their home. Prosecutors refused, and would not even allow the husband
and wife to call their children. Instead, prosecutors took their testimony and
then placed them in a common holding cell with criminal suspects. They were
detained from midnight until 1 p.m. the following day. “We were totally
desperate, but they would not listen to us,” Ibarra said.[173]

Neither federal prosecutors nor
the Army went to check the ranch, despite the couple’s requests. While
the husband and wife were held incommunicado at the prosecutor’s
office, their daughter, Jocelyn Mabel Ibarra Buenrostro, 27, a teacher;
their daughter’s boyfriend, José Ángel
Mejía Martínez, 27, a medical student; and Juan Manuel
Salas Moreno, 40, who worked at Ibarra’s
transport company, all went to the ranch to look for the missing parents.[174] All three were kidnapped by the same kidnappers who had
detained Ibarra and Buenrostro. The kidnappers called Ibarra and his wife to
demand ransom for their three new captives. David Joab Ibarra
Buenrostro—26, Ibarra’s other son—went to deliver ransom
money for them three days later. He was disappeared as well. (A member of a
criminal gang who was later detained confessed to having abducted and killed
the four civilians as revenge for Ibarra and
Buenrostro’s escape, according the Nuevo León state
prosecutors.[175]) Had
security forces gone to the ranch as the parents requested—rather than
detaining them for a full 24 hours after they escaped their captors—they
might have prevented the subsequent disappearances.

In another case, Víctor Adrían
Rodríguez Moreno, Heber Eusebio Reveles Ramos, and
José María Plancarte Sagrero—employees of an import
business—disappeared in the early hours of May 11, 2009, in Coahuila.[176]
Reveles Ramos last spoke with his brother at approximately 1 a.m. to inform him
that he and his colleagues were stopping at a gas station in the city of
Francisco I. Madero. It was the last contact the relatives had with any of the
victims. When the victims’ relatives went to the federal
prosecutor’s office in the area to file a report that they were missing,
officials told them that the men were not responding because they needed time
away from their wives and girlfriends and would reappear soon, according to
Rodríguez’s mother.[177]
Meanwhile, state prosecutors in Coahuila told Reveles Ramos’s brother
that he had to wait until 96 hours had passed before registering a formal
complaint, postponing until May 15 the formal registration of their
disappearance.[178]

In the weeks after the disappearance, investigators failed
to pursue leads that could have led to identifying those responsible for the
crime and preventing future crimes. For example, officials neglected to seek
the cell phone records of the victims. When they were obtained months later,
the records showed that various calls had been made after the victims were
abducted, which could have been used to locate those responsible.[179]
In addition, on May 26, 2009, the victims’ relatives—who,
frustrated by the lackluster efforts of prosecutors and law enforcement
officials, were investigating the disappearance themselves—discovered the
car that the three men had been driving on the night that they disappeared.
They spotted the car parked outside of a home in the town of Compuertas, which
is next to Francisco I. Madero—where the victims had been abducted.

However, according to the families, prosecutors waited
months before taking the basic step of summoning the people who lived in the
home for questioning. And during the lapse of time that investigators neglected
to pursue this and other leads, four additional people disappeared at the same
gas station in Francisco I. Madero. When prosecutors—months
later—finally questioned a young man who lived in the home where the car
had been spotted, his testimony helped lead to identifying several other
suspects in the case, including police officers.[180]
Had investigators promptly and diligently pursued these and other leads, they
may have prevented additional disappearances.

Instead, over the weeks following the May 11 abduction of
the three men, authorities failed to take basic steps search for them, or to
investigate their disappearance. Then, approximately a month after their
abduction, another disappearance following a near-identical pattern occurred in
the same location. At approximately 5:15 a.m. on June 15, 2009, Oscar
Germán Herrera Rocha, Ezequiel Castro Torrecillas, Sergio
Arredondo Sicairos, and Octavio del Billar Piña, were
stopped by police—also at a gas station in Francisco I. Madero.[181]
All four of the men called their wives or partners to report that they were
being stopped under unusual circumstances by police. For example, Herrera Rocha
called his wife and said hastily, “Write down [police] unit number 962
because they are detaining us under the excuse that our car has a robbery
report and it seems suspicious to me.”[182] Then
she heard someone tell him to turn off the phone and the call cut out.
Arredondo also called his wife and provided the number of another police unit:
8244.

The family members of the victims made repeated trips to
Coahuila in the week after their disappearance, filing complaints with state
prosecutors in Torreón and Saltillo. They also pressed for a meeting
with the state attorney general, Jesús Torres Charles, who received them
on June 17 and assured them that the men would show up soon.[183]
Throughout these efforts, the families pressed prosecutors to question the
police assigned to the car units that two of the disappeared men had identified
in their last calls to their relatives.

On July 8, prosecutors detained 35 police from Francisco I. Madero for their alleged participation in the June 15 disappearances,[184]
nine of whom were later charged in the crime. According to the testimony of a man who allegedly worked for a cartel and was questioned by state prosecutors in connection with the disappearance, the same police officers had also collaborated with members of the Zetas in disappearing Víctor Adrían Rodríguez Moreno, Heber Eusebio Réveles Ramos, and José María Plancarte Sagrero, at the same gas station in Francisco I. Madero, weeks earlier.[185]
Had authorities adequately investigated the initial disappearance of three
civilians, they may well have prevented the second one—of four more men.
At the time of writing, none of the officers charged in the case had been convicted,
according to victims’ families, nor had the remains of any victims been
discovered.[186]

Prosecutorial Abdication of Responsibility,
Transfers, and Lack of Coordination

Because Mexico is a federal state, legal competency is
shared between the federal government and 32 federal entities—31 states
and Mexico City (the Federal District). Mexico’s federal government
criminalizes enforced disappearances, as do 18 federal entities—all of
which use definitions different from one another and from the definition the
federal government uses (See chapter, “Inadequate Domestic Legislation to
Prevent and Punish Enforced Disappearances.”). The federal government and
states also use different procedures for investigating disappearances and for
determining whether federal or state prosecutors have jurisdiction to handle
the case.

Federal prosecutors are empowered by law to investigate
disappearances in which federal officials are alleged to have participated or
been involved. They also have jurisdiction to investigate all crimes tied to
organized crime (delincuencia organizada), but the definition of such
crimes and the process of determining whether the definition has been met are
vague and ambiguous. These and other factors, according to the UN Working Group
on Enforced Disappearances, “dilute the responsibilities of federal and
state authorities” to investigate disappearances.[187]

Human Rights Watch found evidence that federal and state
prosecutors take advantage of this dilution of responsibility and the
ambiguities regarding jurisdiction to preemptively decline to investigate
cases, transferring them instead to counterparts. Such decisions are all too
often taken without first conducting a preliminary inquiry into the alleged
crime, which is necessary to reach a well-grounded determination of whether
they have jurisdiction. Indeed, the swiftness and regularity with which
prosecutors unjustifiably claim that a case falls outside of their
jurisdiction, and often redirect the investigation to counterparts, suggests
that they are more concerned with avoiding adding cases to their docket than
fulfilling their obligation to investigate these serious crimes. The impact of
such decisions is to delay the investigation of disappearances—a crime in
which the first hours, days, and weeks are critical for gathering
time-sensitive information.

An example is the case of Gerardo Heath Sánchez,
17. Heath, a high school student from Piedras Negras, Coahuila, was
abducted by armed men on March 18, 2011, along with four members of the
Saldúa family, as they stood on the lawn outside the Saldúa
house.[188]
Heath’s grandfather filed a report of his grandson’s disappearance
on April 9, 2011, through an online system administered by the executive
branch.[189]
On April 13, he received a response from the executive branch saying that the
case had been passed to the Ministry of Public Security (the federal law
enforcement agency) to be investigated.[190]
Federal officials provided no explanation as to why the disappearance was
initially relegated to public security officials rather than prosecutors, who
are the appropriate authority to investigate crimes. On May 5, Garza’s
grandfather received another communication from the executive branch informing
him that his complaint had also been transferred to the federal
prosecutor’s office.[191]

Heath’s grandfather did not receive a response from
the Ministry of Public Security until June 13, 2011—two months after he
had filed his original report. The letter informed him that his report had been
directed to the Office of the Commissioner General of the Federal Police
(Oficina del Comisionado General de la Policía Federal), and provided a
number to call if he wanted updates on its progress.[192]
The communiqué provided no case number or additional information
regarding the status of the investigation. When he called the telephone number
provided, however, he was told on multiple occasions that the office had no
record of his grandson’s case, and that such investigations did not fall
within the office’s authority.[193]

On June 22, Heath’s grandfather received a letter from
the federal prosecutor’s office stating that, upon review, they had
concluded that they did not have legal jurisdiction over the case, and that he
should report the disappearance to the state prosecutor’s office.[194]
The federal prosecutor’s office reached this conclusion based on the
brief complaint Heath’s grandfather had submitted via email, and without
having interviewed him or the victim’s parents, or conducted any other
preliminary inquiries into the case.[195] In
sum, approximately two and a half months after filing his complaint with the
federal government, the only information Heath’s grandfather received was
that federal prosecutors did not have jurisdiction to investigate the case and
that federal police had no record of its having taken place.

Prosecutors’
offices can also abuse jurisdictional ambiguities by repeatedly transferring
control over an investigation to other state actors, leading to excessive
delays and the loss of key evidence, as is demonstrated in the disappearance of
more than a dozen men from Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas—allegedly
perpetrated by Navy personnel over the span of the first week of June 2011. The
investigation into the abductions was passed between at least four federal
prosecutors in less than six months, according to a human rights defender
representing the families and records of monthly meetings between the
government and the victims’ relatives.[196] First assigned to a delegate of the federal
prosecutor’s office in Nuevo Laredo, the case was transferred to a
federal prosecutor in Mexico City. From there, it was sent back to the federal
prosecutor’s office in Nuevo Laredo—but to a different prosecutor
from the one initially assigned to the case—and then to a special
prosecutor in Reynosa, Tamaulipas. Each time a new chief investigator was
assigned the case, the victims’ families and their lawyer said, they had
to start from scratch in bringing the official up to speed.[197] The federal prosecutor’s office gave
families no explanation for the repeated change in the official leading the
investigation, which, according to a recommendation issued in August 2012 by
the National Human Rights Commission, is still open.[198]

What’s more, the federal prosecutor’s
investigation in the case is one of the three investigations open into the
alleged disappearances—by federal, state, and military prosecutors,
respectively—according to a December 2011 meeting between victims’
families and various authorities.[199]
In none of these investigations have members of the Navy been charged.[200]

It is not uncommon that concurrent investigations into
disappearances are opened in multiple jurisdictions. However, attorneys
general, prosecutors, and law enforcement officials told Human Rights Watch
that, rather than complementing one another, prosecutors from different
institutions often fail to cooperate and share critical information, which
undermines their ability to effectively investigate cases. For example, the
head of the federal prosecutor’s delegation in Saltillo, Coahuila told
Human Rights Watch that they collaborated closely with the state
prosecutor’s office on cases and shared information fluidly.[201]
However, state prosecutors in Coahuila assigned to a special unit tasked with
investigating disappearances said that the federal prosecutor’s office
almost never shared information, even when they specifically requested data
relevant to an investigation.[202]
“They are very protective of their information. They don’t
share,”[203]
one state prosecutor told Human Rights Watch. Coahuila state prosecutors were
unaware of how many investigations into disappearances federal prosecutors had
opened in the state, or whether any of those cases overlapped with ones they
were investigating.[204]
(According to the federal prosecutor’s office, they had opened 20
investigations into disappearances in Coahuila—none of which had led to
suspects being charged.)

State prosecutors said they encountered particular
resistance when they sought relevant information from SIEDO—the Special
Federal Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime. Then-director of public
security in Coahuila, Gerardo Villarreal Ríos, said many local
investigations had been hindered by the unwillingness of SIEDO to allow state
prosecutors to interview their detainees, who state prosecutors suspected had
information relevant to specific cases. “There is a definite problem of
lack of coordination between institutions. SIEDO takes detainees off to Mexico
City and they don’t share any information with us,” he said.[205]
The coordinators of prosecutors from all four regions of the state of Nuevo
Leon echoed this criticism. It was especially acute, said one prosecutor, when
SIEDO arrested ranking members of organized crime groups who were off limits to
questioning by state prosecutors.[206]

Relying on Victims’ Families to Investigate

Victims’ families uniformly said that authorities
relied disproportionately, if not entirely, on the relatives of the disappeared
to perform the investigative duties of prosecutors and judicial police.
Authorities often asked families to take on responsibilities such as
interviewing witnesses, checking the site of an abduction, and seeking
information from the security forces allegedly responsible for disappearances,
all with little concern for the risk such tasks implied. In many cases,
investigators told families that the investigation’s progress depended
entirely on the efforts of families. While it is appropriate and indeed
necessary for investigators to work with victims’ relatives in
investigating disappearances, such collaboration must be largely driven by
investigators and should not place families at risk.

A mother whose son
was abducted outside of her home in March 2011 told Human Rights Watch that whenever she met
with the investigator in charge of the case, he began their conversation the
same way. “He asks me, ‘What new info do you have for me?’
Well, aren’t [the prosecutors] the ones who are supposed to have the new
info?”[207] She said that when she complained of the lack of
progress in the investigation, the prosecutor said, “That’s your
problem. You have to investigate.”[208] According to Francisco Aldaco
Juárez—whose uncle, Antonio Jaime Aldaco Juárez, disappeared
in Saltillo, Coahuila, in March 2010—“The prosecutor’s office
tells you: ‘You give us leads and we will look into them,’ when in
fact they are the ones who are supposed to investigate.”[209] The aunt of José René Luna
Ramírez—who disappeared after witnesses saw him picked up by
men in federal judicial police uniforms on May 2, 2007—said that when she
pressed investigators for updates on the investigation, they told her,
“If you don’t have any news, we don’t either.”[210]

In addition, authorities relied on families to perform
investigative duties that are the job of officials, in some cases encouraging
families to take actions that involved serious risk. Daniel Obregón
Hernández was abducted together with more than a dozen men and boys
when armed, masked men came to their neighborhood in Monterrey, Nuevo
León on July 17, 2010, and started loading young men into their trucks
at gunpoint.[211]
According to Obregón’s mother—who immediately filed a
complaint with the public prosecutor’s office—a man nicknamed
“Aciva” was initially rounded up with the other victims, but was
set free when one of the abductors said he knew him. Obregón’s
mother repeatedly suggested investigators interview Aciva.

Instead, judicial police told Obregón’s mother
she should first find information on Aciva for them,[212]
as is reflected in a September 15, 2010 judicial police report providing an
update on the investigation. In it, officials fault Obregón’s
mother for not locating Aciva, implying that it was her responsibility.
“Investigators asked [Obregón’s mother] to provide them with
the home and full name of the person referred to as ACIVA in her
complaint,” the report states, “to which she responded that she did
not know where the person lived but that she would try to obtain the requested
information as soon as possible, and that as soon as she had it she would
immediately inform the agents, which according to the agents has not
happened.”[213]
Their report made no mention of investigators’ own efforts to locate
Aciva, such as canvassing other neighbors who had witnessed the
abductions—one of many investigative steps they failed to undertake.

In April 2009, a trucker and 10 of his fellow employees from
the transport company “Franjimex” disappeared in Coahuila.[214]
The last phone calls from several of the victims were made from a ranch called
“El Venado,” near the city of Piedras Negras. In a February 2012
meeting with federal prosecutors, the victims’ families pleaded with them
to search the ranch, which state prosecutors had never done in the nearly three
years since their abductions.[215]
In response to the family’s request, an official told the family that
investigators could not go to the ranch because it was located in a remote part
of the state, but he encouraged the relatives to visit the ranch themselves and
see what they could find.[216]
The prosecutor gave this advice despite the fact that evidence suggested the
victims may have been disappeared in the same place, implying a serious risk
for the family members. According to the family, when they requested a police
escort to accompany them to the ranch, the delegate said the most he could do
was lend them police dogs.[217]

Prosecutors routinely
recommend that victims’ families visit the offices of security forces
operating in the area in order to inquire if they are holding the disappeared
person—inquiries that should be undertaken by justice officials. Human
Rights Watch found this occurs even in cases where initial evidence suggests
the participation of security forces in abductions, demonstrating a flagrant
disregard for families’ safety. For example, on June 28, 2011, around 4
a.m., approximately 10 men in Navy uniforms entered the home of René
Azael Jasso Maldonado, 26, in Sabinas Hidalgo, Nuevo León.[218] His parents and brother, who live next door and
whose home was also searched without a warrant, told Human Rights Watch the
members of the Navy dragged Jasso Maldonado outside and loaded him into a
waiting vehicle.[219] The officers did not show an arrest warrant or
provide information as to where they were taking him, the family said. Later
that morning, the victims’ parents went to the state prosecutor’s
office to report his illegal arrest, but an official there told them they had
to wait eight days before filing a formal complaint. The next day, the family
tried to file a complaint with the federal prosecutor’s office, but it
also refused to accept the complaint. Instead, officials advised the family to
go a neighboring Navy base to inquire into his whereabouts, as well as to visit
other police stations and Army bases in the area.

Some families followed the advice of prosecutors to visit
the offices of security forces, only to find that their inquiries resulted
directly in threats and harassment from authorities. Patricio Gutierrez Cruz
(pseudonym)—17, a lathe operator—was arbitrarily detained around 6
p.m. by municipal police on his neighborhood on March 13, 2011.[220]
He had left his home five minutes earlier to play soccer with friends, his
mother said, who had been home at the time.[221]
Several neighbors told Gutierrez’s mother they had seen police handcuff
him and load him in the back of an unmarked pick-up truck as they conducted a
raid on the neighborhood with more than a dozen patrol car units. (Two other men
detained in the same raid were also never seen again, their families told Human
Rights Watch.)

When Gutierrez’s mother reported the case to the state
prosecutor’s office on March 14, they advised her to inquire about his
whereabouts at the local police station, which she promptly did.[222]
She was taken in to speak with the chief; she told him that her son had been
detained by municipal police, and asked where he had been taken. He denied his
officers had carried out any operations in her neighborhood. Pointing to a full
lot of police cars outside his window, he said, “The way you see all the
patrol cars [parked] there—that’s how they were yesterday.”
According to the mother, when she pressed the chief about her sons location, he
responded in a threatening tone, “No one comes in here and tells me what
to do.”

Forced to choose between taking on risk or giving up the
search for their loved ones, families interviewed by Human Rights Watch nearly
always chose to assume the risk of continuing to look. In a vicious cycle, the
families continue to take on more and more of the authorities’
responsibilities because they know that investigators will not do the work
themselves. And rather than reclaim their investigative responsibilities,
justice officials become more accustomed to passing off their duties to the
victims’ relatives.

Corrupt Investigators and the Loss of
Families’ Trust

Human Rights Watch found evidence in more than a dozen
instances of authorities taking advantage of families who denounced
disappearances, using the information provided by victims’ relatives to
extort them or sharing such information with the perpetrators of the crimes.
For example, four friends—Moises Gamez Almanza, 24, Marco
Antonio Coronado Castillo, 24, Julio César Coronado Noriega, 18,
and Luis Francisco Medina Rodríguez, 24—were abducted at
approximately 12:30 a.m. on October 11, 2009, as they drove to meet a friend in
San Luis Potosí.[223]
The Gamez family waited a day and a half before reporting the crime, out of
hope that the abductors would call for ransom, and then decided to go to the
police.

Gamez’s mother filed a complaint at approximately
12:30 p.m. on October 12 at the state prosecutor’s office, providing her
cell phone number and home address.[224]
Within an hour of going to the police, the victim’s mother received a
call on her cell phone demanding she pay 500,000 pesos if she wanted to see her
son again.[225]
None of the families of the other three victims, or other members of Gamez
family, received ransom calls before or after that time, suggesting a link
between the ransom call and the fact that she provided her telephone number to
the public prosecutor’s office.[226]

Gamez’s mother immediately reported the ransom call to
judicial police.[227]
While she was at their offices reporting the threat, she received another call
from the alleged kidnappers, threatening her for having told authorities about
the ransom request. According to her testimony, the person who called her said:
“Old cunt, we know that you went to the judicial police. We are going to
kill your son. We don’t want your money anymore.”[228]In spite of signs suggesting police could have been involved in
the calls, the police adamantly recommended to the family that they pay the
ransom—advice that is not mentioned in otherwise detailed reports by
justice officials on their investigation into the case.[229]

Besides the suspect timing and targeting of the ransom call,
and the aggressive advice of the police that the family should pay the ransom,
other irregularities pointed to police involvement in the extortion. On October
14, while the Gamez family was waiting for a follow-up phone call from the
alleged kidnappers, judicial police officers arrived unannounced at their home
and asked to come in.[230]
Minutes later, the kidnappers called again, telling the family to pay the
ransom if they did not want their son to be killed. Here again, the ranking
police officer on the scene, who had listened in on the call, told the
victim’s mother, “My advice to you—as a human being rather
than a police officer—is to pay the ransom, because in most of these
cases those kidnapped are killed.”[231]
She said the police insisted that she go alone to hand over the ransom payment,
citing safety concerns, despite her requests that the police follow her. Again,
the police’s advice that the family pay the ransom was left out of an
otherwise detailed police report regarding the day of the handover.[232]

Furthermore, when the victim’s mother handed over the
money, the police made no attempt to pursue the car of the alleged kidnappers
or trace their license plates. The victim’s mother provided a description
of the man she had handed the ransom over to, which a sketch artist used to
make a drawing of the suspect. But she said police did not disseminate the
sketch and refused to share it with the victims’ families until two years
after the incident.[233]
The family never heard from the kidnappers again, and neither Gamez nor his
three friends were ever seen again.

Impact on Families of Disappeared Persons

Relatives of the Disappeared: the Right to Truth
and the Open-Ended Anguish of Not Knowing

Authorities have a special obligation in cases of enforced
disappearance to provide information to the victims' relatives. The right of
victims’ families to know the truth in cases of disappearances is
guaranteed by international law,[234] and
included in both the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons
from Enforced Disappearance[235] and
the Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons.[236]
The International Convention provides: “Each victim has the right to know
the truth regarding the circumstances of the enforced
disappearance…”[237] In
addition, the Committee against Torture has affirmed that the right of victims
to obtain “redress”—guaranteed by article 14 of the
Convention against Torture[238]—includes
the right to the following remedies:

[E]ffective measures aimed at the cessation of continuing
violations; verification of the facts and full and public disclosure of the
truth to the extent that such disclosure does not cause further harm or
threaten the safety and interests of the victim, the victim’s relatives,
witnesses, or persons who have intervened to assist the victim or prevent the
occurrence of further violations; the search for the whereabouts of the disappeared,
for the identities of the children abducted, and for the bodies of those
killed, and assistance in the recovery, identification, and reburial of
victims’ bodies in accordance with the expressed or presumed wish of the
victims or affected families; an official declaration or judicial decision
restoring the dignity, the reputation and the rights of the victim and of
persons closely connected with the victim; judicial and administrative
sanctions against persons liable for the violations; public apologies,
including acknowledgement of the facts and acceptance of responsibility;
commemorations and tributes to the victims.[239]

The U.N. Human Rights Committee has held that state failure
to pursue cases or provide information about the fate of a disappeared person
to families can inflict extreme anguish upon relatives of the disappeared,
which make them victims of the violation as well. In the case of Quinteros
v. Uruguay, which was brought before the UN Human Rights Committee by the
mother of a woman who was allegedly disappeared by members of the Uruguayan
military, the Committee recognized, “the anguish and stress caused to the
mother by the disappearance of her daughter and by the continuing uncertainty
concerning her fate and whereabouts. [The mother] has the right to know what
has happened to her daughter. In these respects, she too is a victim of the
violations of the Covenant suffered by her daughter in particular, of article
7.”[240] For
the families, not knowing what happened to a relative is a source of ongoing
suffering, and may even amount to torture, according to the UN Working Group on
Enforced Disappearance. “The State cannot restrict the right to know the
truth about the fate and the whereabouts of the disappeared as such restriction
only adds to, and prolongs, the continuous torture inflicted upon the
relatives.”[241]

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has recognized the
profound impact disappearances have on the members of victims’ families
and their members’ life trajectories. In the November 2009 ruling in the
case of Radilla Pacheco v. Mexico, which involved a man who was
disappeared by the Mexican military in 1974,[242] the
Court observed that:

[A]ccording to the report on the psychosocial effects on
the next of kin of Mr. Rosendo Radilla, his disappearance has had a traumatic
and differentiated impact on the family as a whole due to the forced
restructuring of roles of each one of its members with the evident effects on
each of their life projects. Both Mr. Rosendo Radilla Martínez and Mrs.
Andrea Radilla Martínez offered statements in that sense. The latter
testified that: “[Her] life changed completely, from feeling protected,
supported, and at peace, she went on to feeling responsible for [her] mother
and her responsibilities, [s]he fe[lt] interrogated, watched, and that
everybody turned their back on her, anguish went on to be [her] natural
state.”[243]

Emotional and Psychological Impact

Many relatives of the “disappeared” told Human
Rights Watch that they feel an overriding obligation to set aside the other
parts of their lives until they find out what has happened to their loved ones.
They described this feeling as motivated by a range of factors, from hope of
finding the missing person alive, to feelings of guilt about returning to their
lives while their loved ones’ fate remained unknown. They were also
driven by the belief that if they did not take up the search themselves and
constantly press authorities to do their job, no one would look for their loved
ones—a belief that was reinforced by the lackluster, flawed work of
prosecutors.

For relatives, not knowing what has happened to a loved one
is a source of perpetual anguish. They describe worrying constantly about
whether their relatives are alive and whether they are suffering, and they feel
powerlessness to help. The emotional and psychological consequences of this
suffering are severe. Relatives reported depression, insomnia, feelings of
social isolation, and physical effects like exhaustion. Many also described
symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder, such as fear of
leaving home or—in the case of relatives who were present when abductions
took place—fear of returning to the locations where they occurred.
Disappearances also take a significant toll on the relationships among family
members, dividing them over whether to press for investigations or move on and
affecting parents’ ability to care for other children.

Many families said they were unable to resume their lives
while the whereabouts of their relatives remained unknown, which they described
as a never-ending reservoir of suffering. The mother of Claudia Rizada
Rodríguez—26, who was disappeared in June 2011—told
Human Rights Watch:

It is psychological torture to always be thinking about
where your family member is, what happened to her, and what conditions she is
in. And it affects your life too, which will never be the same. If you
experience a moment of happiness, you feel guilty because you say to yourself,
“Here I am enjoying myself, and my loved one? How is she?’”[244]

The mother of Israel Arenas, 17, who disappeared
along with three co-workers after being detained by municipal transit police on
June 17, 2011, in Monterrey, Nuevo León, said of his absence: “It
is a daily torture—not knowing where he is. If they are torturing him. If
he has eaten anything yet. Even reminding us of him hurts our hearts.”[245] The mother said her
suffering was exacerbated by authorities’ failure to detain officials who
had been identified by witnesses as participating in her son’s
disappearance. “Who is responsible for this if officials say that it was
not the police? This is a source of even greater pain. A sense of
powerlessness.”[246]

Many relatives give up everything—leaving behind
established careers, uprooting entire families, and abandoning long-standing
relationships—to focus entirely on their search for the disappeared. For
example, Víctor Manuel Rolon Rodríguez, 51, a US resident,
was working for an oil company in Houston, Texas, when he learned that his
nephew—Adrián Domínguez Rolon, 33, a federal police
officer—had disappeared in Uruapan, Michoacán, on February 17,
2011.[247]
Víctor had spoken almost daily with his nephew on the phone, and was
devastated by his disappearance.[248] After
months of hearing his sister, the victim’s mother, express her
frustration with the lackluster efforts of prosecutors and describe potential
official complicity in the crime, he left his home to search for his nephew in
Michoacán. Originally planning to stay briefly, when he spoke to Human
Rights Watch in Mexico in September 2012, he had stayed over a year. He said he
had lost nearly everything while searching for his nephew:

I lost 90% of what I had [in Houston]. I lost my job. I
lost a car I was paying down. I lost decades of my savings, which I spent my
way through. I lost my home because I stopped paying the mortgage...But I left
all of those things aside, because for me family is first. With time, I will
see what I can do to fix my other problems.[249]

Víctor recognized the serious toll the search had
taken on his own life, emotionally and financially. But he said one of the main
reasons he could not give up looking was his certainty that, without his
pressure and monitoring, authorities would do nothing to search for his nephew.
This belief was rooted in his interactions with investigators in the case,
which he described as “extremely frustrating,” on account of the
litany of missteps and omissions they had made.[250]
For example, prosecutors told the family they had to wait 72 hours before
opening an investigation, took months to track his nephew’s cell phone
(which he had been using the day he disappeared), and failed to recognize
significant inconsistencies in the accounts of his Federal Police superiors,
which Víctor believed raised questions about their complicity.

Víctor was
concerned that his search had placed his hard-earned US residency at risk,
through a combination of unfortunate events. He had received a speeding ticket
shortly before leaving Houston to search for his nephew, and had been given a
date to answer for the infraction in court. But he had failed to return to the
US for the date, on account of not wanting to leave Mexico until he had found
his nephew. Then, in August 2012, he was assaulted on a bus in Mexico City, and
his US resident card and Texas driver’s license were stolen. Having
missed a court date, and without his identification cards, he believed that he
might not be allowed back into the United States. “After 25 years of
building up my good reputation as a citizen there, I may never be able to go
back,” he said.[251] But it was a price he was willing to pay to
continue the search for his nephew, he said. His nephew—and his
nephew’s work partner, federal police officer Miguel Gutiérrez
Cruz, who disappeared with him in February 2011—have not been seen
since the day they disappeared.

Teresa Hernández Melchor, 40—whose
17-year-old son, Jesús Humberto Cantero Hernández
disappeared on March 9, 2010, together with eight other men from San Diego de
la Libertad, Guanajuato—said that she had been so consumed by the search
for her son that she had “neglected” her other four children.[252]
(Cantero and the other men were abducted shortly after leaving their community
with a coyote, or smuggler, whom they had paid to transport them to the
United States without papers.[253]) While
she said she recognized the imbalance, she told Human Rights Watch, “I
cannot stop or think about anything else.” She said, “There are
times when I say that I can’t go on anymore, but if I don’t look
for my son, who will? If I die, everything ends there.”[254]

Oziel Antonio Jasso Maldonado witnessed his brother René—26, a
taxi driver—being arbitrarily detained from their family’s
home by men in Navy uniforms in June 2011.[255]
René never returned. (For a more detailed summary of Jasso’s case,
see previous chapter “Enforced Disappearances by the Navy.”) Of the
search for his brother, which had led him to file legal appeals, visit
countless police and military installations, and press prosecutors for an
investigation, Oziel said:

It is an exhausting process, as much in terms of your
spirits as psychologically. We have tried to be strong. Very strong. Too
strong. Because it feels terrible to come home from work and not see my brother
there. To come home and see my mother crying. To come home and see that my
father is just sitting in the rocking chair, doing nothing else, without saying
a word.[256]

The disappearance of a loved one can also lead to painful
disputes among surviving family members, which exacerbate the anguish
experienced from a disappearance. Victims’ families are often divided
over whether to search for loved ones—which is a source of ongoing
suffering and may place them at risk—or to give up the search, which engenders
feelings of guilt and grief. For example, Diana Cantú García,
55—whose son Daniel Cantú Iris disappeared in
2007—said her husband and other children told her that her search for her
son had taken over her life and advised her to move on.[257]
“I told them: ‘Don’t ask me to stop looking. I would have
done the same for you. I don’t want you to forget him
either,’” Cantú told Human Rights Watch. She said the
disagreement over whether to keep searching for her son played a major role in
her divorce from her husband two years after her son’s disappearance.[258]
The search for her son had become her single defining goal in life, she said,
one she would continue “for as long as I am alive.”[259]

Relatives of the missing reported serious emotional and
psychological effects in the aftermath of disappearances. Rosario Villanueva
Rocha said that after months of searching for her son Oscar Herrera Rocha,
25, who disappeared in June 2009 with three co-workers, she fell into a deep
depression.[260] (For a
more detailed summary of the case, see previous chapter “How the Failure
to Investigate Contributes Directly to More Disappearances.”) “Some
nights I said goodbye to my other children before I went to bed, because I
didn’t think I was going to wake up again,” Villanueva told Human
Rights Watch.[261] She
said she was so depressed that she spent over a month in bed, and had to seek
psychological treatment.

The mother of Salvador Moya (pseudonym)—21, who
was abducted while working for a local bus company in Escobedo, Nuevo León,
in April 2011—said that she was so distraught after her son’s
disappearance that she could not stop scratching her face, scouring it until it
bled.[262] She
said that she did not leave her home for two months, abandoning her previously
active lifestyle and severing all contact with friends. “I am
finished,” she told Human Rights Watch. “I cannot recover.”[263]
She said she wakes up every night at 3 a.m., which is the time that men
claiming to have kidnapped her son had said they would release him after the
family had paid ransom, although he never returned.

Families of victims—particularly those who were
present when their relatives were abducted—described living in constant
fear that they or another relative would be disappeared next. The mother of
Roberto Iván Hernández García—a 17-year-old who
was abducted by men in Federal Police uniforms in March 2011—said,
“You find yourself in crisis. We are all afraid—even when we are
stopped by a traffic cop. You cannot trust any authority.”[264] (For a more detailed
summary of the case, see previous chapter “Enforced Disappearances by
Federal Police.”)

Psychological Impact on Children

Children suffer acute emotional and psychological effects
from disappearances, parents and guardians told Human Rights Watch. They said
it was very difficult to explain to children what it means for the fate of a
person to be unknown, or that a parent may never return. Parents and caretakers
described feeling torn about how much to tell children, especially young
children, and how to balance the desire to give them hope with the likelihood
that parents would not return.

Surviving parents and guardians of children of
“disappeared” individuals said the children manifested chronic
fear, depression, lack of motivation in school, social isolation, and
separation anxiety when leaving surviving parents and relatives for even brief
periods. For example, not long after Agnolo Pabel Medina Flores, 32,
disappeared in August 2010, his two children, ages 10 and 8, both began
to show signs of depression, members of his family said.[265]
(For more detailed summary of the cases, see previous chapter, “Failure
to Promptly Track the Victim’s Cell Phone, Bank Accounts, or Other
Immediate Traces.”) The older son could not stop crying in school and had
difficulty focusing, while the younger boy became introverted and stopped
communicating with others. In another case, the nine-year-old nephew of
Samuel Álvarez (pseudonym)—27, who worked in the family
textile business and was abducted in Monclova, Coahuila, on November 10,
2011—was profoundly affected by his uncle’s disappearance.[266]
The boy was very close with his uncle, whom he knew had been abducted by local
police. In addition, the boy knew his mother had subsequently been threatened
for trying to pursue the case, and feared another relative would be taken next.
Whenever his mother was about to separate from him, even for short periods, the
boy started to cry and beg her not to leave.He
began to urinate in his bed nightly, and was terrified whenever he saw police.[267]

It is not only young children who are affected by
disappearances. Héctor Armando Tapia Osollo—46, a civil
engineer—was taken from his home by men wearing Federal Police uniforms
around 1:45 a.m. on June 19, 2010, according to his wife, Ixchel Teresa
Mireles Rodríguez, who was with him at the time.[268]
The daughter of Tapia and Mireles, age 17, who was in high school at the time,
was profoundly changed by the incident, her mother said. She did not tell
anyone that her father had disappeared, out of fear they would assume her
father was a criminal (something people presumed when a person was killed or
disappeared).[269] She
asked her mother not to tell anyone what had happened either, and pressed her
to give up her search for her father, which she feared would end in her death.
“They kill everyone,” she told her mother. “Why not
us?”[270] She
feared being separated from her mother, calling her constantly when they were
apart to check in.

In several cases documented by Human Rights Watch,
disappearances led to children being separated from their siblings, further
exacerbating their ongoing emotional hardship. For example, when single mother Mónica
Isabel Esquivel Castillo, 22—a private security guard—was
abducted in Saltillo, Coahuila, in September 2011, she left behind two
children, ages 8 and 2.[271] (For a
more detailed summary of the case, see previous chapter, “Unfounded
Presumptions about Victims’ Whereabouts.”) Esquivel had previously
been separated from her husband, and after her disappearance, her mother and
husband fought over custody of the children.[272]
Ultimately, the elder daughter went to live with the victim’s husband,
while the younger daughter went to live with the victim’s mother. The
sisters only see each other once every few weeks, according to their
grandmother. In other cases, children were sent to different relatives to
distribute the time and cost of raising them among members of the families.

Threats, Harassment, and Attacks Targeting Families
of the Disappeared

Victims’ families face harassment and intimidation
aimed at discouraging them from reporting disappearances to prosecutors and law
enforcement officials. And when families report disappearances, they are
subject to threats and attacks, particularly in cases where evidence points to
the involvement of members of the military and police. These attacks not only
sow fear among the families targeted, but also terrorize other relatives of the
disappeared who learn about the attacks and may be dissuaded from taking
similar actions out of fear. Mexico has obligations under the International
Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance to
ensure not only the right to report the facts of a disappearance to the
competent authorities and a prompt, thorough impartial investigation of the
report, but also to take measures to protect anyone—including the
complainant—participating in the investigation, from any ill-treatment or
intimidation as a consequence of the complaint.[273]

On the night of July 3, 2011—three days after Oralia
Guadalupe Villaseñor Vásquez met with federal prosecutors and
the Ministry of the Interior to press for investigations into her
husband’s disappearance (as well as that of more than a dozen others) by
members of the Navy—her house was sprayed with bullets.[274]
(For a more detailed summary of the case, see previous chapter, “Enforced
Disappearances by the Navy.”) Villaseñor’s husband,
José Fortino Martínez Martínez, had been abducted by men
wearing Navy uniforms on June 5, 2011, after which she became an outspoken
advocate for victims’ families. On the morning of the attack, an
interview with Villaseñor and other victims’ relatives had
appeared in La Jornada, a well-known national newspaper, critical of the
lack of progress of the investigations.[275]
Villaseñor, who was not at home at the time of the attack—she was
staying with her four children at her mother’s house—later counted
more than 40 bullet holes in the exterior of her home. She told Human Rights
Watch that, shortly before the attack, a neighbor saw a white car idling on her
street accompanied by a truck marked with Navy insignia; the neighbor said it
was the white truck that fired on the house.[276]
Villaseñor said she believes she was targeted in retaliation for her
public criticism of the Navy. After the attack she was afraid to take her
children back to their home, and the family spent more and more time at
Villaseñor’s mother’s home.

According to Raymundo Ramos Vázquez, a lawyer from
the human rights organization that represents Villaseñor and some of the
other families whose relatives disappeared in Tamaulipas, the attack had an
immediate chilling effect on other families of the missing.[277]
Several families of disappeared individuals, he said, subsequently chose to
dial back their efforts or gave up their demands for accountability in the
cases of their relatives.

Roberto Iván Hernández García and
Yudith Yesenia Rueda García, both age 17, were abducted from
the home of Rueda’s grandmother in Monterrey, Nuevo León, on March
11, 2011, by men wearing federal police uniforms.[278]
(For a more detailed summary of the case, see previous chapter “Enforced
Disappearances by Federal Police.”) Several family members witnessed
their abduction. In the immediate aftermath, the victims’ relatives
searched for them in various official locations, including police stations and
prosecutors’ offices.[279]
Approximately a week after their abduction, a man in plainclothes came to
Hernández’s family’s home, a relative told Human Rights
Watch. The relative said that the man, who never identified himself, asked if
the family had filed a formal complaint. When the relative said they had not,
the man warned, “Don’t file a complaint. Something could happen to
you or your children.”[280] Out of
fear the family waited months before reporting the disappearance.

In several cases victims’ families told Human Rights
Watch they received threats shortly after reporting cases to police or justice
officials, suggesting that state actors either shared information with people
responsible for carrying out abductions, or were themselves the perpetrators.
For example, Antonio Jaime Aldaco Juárez, 40, a construction
worker, disappeared on the night of March 27, 2010, after attending a
friend’s wedding in Saltillo, Coahuila.[281]
In the first week of April 2010, his family went to judicial police to file a
formal complaint. However, the chief, Darío de la Rosa, said he was too
busy to attend to them and told them to come back another day. Days later, on
April 11, the victim’s family received an anonymous call from a man who
said, “Stop acting brave or Julio César is next,” referring
to a younger brother of Antonio Jaime Aldaco Juárez.[282]
A week later the family received another threatening call, saying, “I am
not telling you again—you have already been warned. Julio César is
next.” The family believed the threats were intended to dissuade them
from returning to the prosecutor’s office to file a formal complaint.

On March 1, 2010, Francis Alejandro García Orozco,
32, Lenin Vladimir Pita Barrera, 18, Sergio Menes Landa, 22,
Olimpo Hernández Villa, 34, Andrés Antonio Orduña
Vázquez, 21, and Zozimo Chacón Jiménez, 22,
were abducted from the nightclub in Iguala, Guerrero, where they worked.[283]
Strong evidence points to the participation of members of the Army in the
crime, including video camera footage showing what appear to be military
vehicles participating in the abduction, an eyewitness account and official
complaint that put soldiers at the scene of the crime that night, and
statements by the military acknowledging that it had contact with the victims
that night.[284] A week
after the men disappeared, the families put up posters with the victims’
photographs around Iguala that read: “Army: Return our sons to us.”
Several days later, one of the families received a telephone call saying,
“You are meddling in dangerous things,” and “We know where
your sons are.”[285] Days
after the families organized a “march against insecurity” on March
22, 2010, a relative of one of the victims received a threatening phone call. A
man warned: “Tone down the bravery, you’re kicking up a lot of
dust.” In a separate incident, shortly after reporting the disappearances
to the National Human Rights Commission and the Army in Mexico City, one of the
victims’ relatives was driving along a highway when a white pick-up truck
without license plates began to follow him. When he tried to evade the vehicle,
it repeatedly crashed into the back of his car and tried to force him off the
road.[286]

As a result of these and other attacks, several families
abandoned their efforts to press for an investigation and cut off communication
with the other victims’ families. Families who have continued to publicly
denounce the case have suffered ongoing harassment. Laura
Estela García Orozco, the sister
of Francis Alejandro García Orozco, has been among the most active in
making public calls for soldiers to be investigated. On November 21, 2012, six
armed soldiers stopped outside of the business she owns and began to take
photos and video with a handheld camera, she said. “I’m very
afraid,” she told Human Rights Watch, in an email written while the
soldiers were outside. “They are very intimidating.”[287] The soldiers’ visit came only weeks after
García Orozco questioned why the military’s investigation into the
disappearances had not advanced, despite strong evidence of soldiers’
participation, in a public meeting with Army officials in Acapulco.[288]

In some cases, family members of
victims have themselves been accused by authorities of being involved or of
hiding information about their relatives. The wife of Isaías
Uribe Hernández—who disappeared in Torreón, Coahuila,
on April 4, 2009, with his co-worker and friend Juan Pablo Alvarado Oliveros—was
visiting her missing husband’s parents in Oaxaca in January 2010 when a
military convoy arrived at their home.[289] (For a
more detailed summary of the cases, see previous chapter, “Negligence,
Delays, Errors, and Fabrications.”) The soldiers said military investigators
wanted to speak with her at a base in Torreón the following day,
approximately 900 miles to the north. She flew to Torreón the next
morning and drove immediately to the base, where soldiers told her she had to
report to a different Army base, in Lerdo, Durango.

According to Uribe’s wife, upon arriving at the base
in Lerdo, soldiers took her to a windowless room. There a military prosecutor
asked her to give a full account of her husband’s disappearance. (At that
point, she had already provided several accounts of her husband’s
disappearance to federal and state prosecutors.[290])
She said she was very frightened being questioned on a military base, due to
the fact that she had publicly denounced the Army for participating in her
husband’s disappearance.[291] As she
provided her account, she told Human Rights Watch, the military prosecutor
constantly interrupted her with aggressive questions, repeatedly asking,
“How do I know you're not lying?” and, “Are you sure you
don’t know where your husband is?” The interrogation lasted four
hours. At the end, she said, the military prosecutor told her, “I am
going to summon all the family members and witnesses to make sure you are not
lying. If they don’t want to come, I’ll force them to.”[292]
The wife never heard from the military prosecutor again, and when she inquired
with federal prosecutors three months later about the status of the
military’s investigation into the case, she was told that the military
prosecutor’s office had never opened an investigation.

Economic Impact

Disappearances have devastating financial consequences for
victim’s families, with particularly significant impacts on vulnerable
groups such as children and families living in poverty. Not only must families
adjust to the abrupt loss of income, but also the potential loss of basic
social services that are tied to employment of the disappeared person. In order
to maintain access to these services, families are forced to go through a slow,
costly process of having their loved one declared absent or deceased, which
aggravates their suffering. Despite the requirements of the International
Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance that appropriate steps are taken to regularize the
legal situation of the relatives in fields such as social welfare, families of
the disappeared in Mexico face a daunting and expensive bureaucratic route to
guarantee continued security in the wake of a relative being disappeared.[293]

The overwhelming
majority of persons disappeared in cases documented by Human Rights Watch were
working class men with families. These men were commonly the principal wage
earners in households with several children. When they went missing, their
dependents often had to take immediate measures to adapt to the loss of income
and provide for dependents, such as moving in with relatives and taking on new
jobs. This economic impact was exacerbated by the suspension of fundamental
social services provided by the government, some of which are conditioned on
the employment of a member of the household. When people had been missing for
weeks or months, their employers often terminated their jobs, putting access to
these services in jeopardy. As a result, families not only abruptly lost the
income of the disappeared person, but also access to health coverage,
childcare, and housing subsidies. In other cases, authorities abruptly stopped
providing pensions and social security to the spouses of the disappeared.

Among the social services most commonly jeopardized by the
disappearance of the sole working member of a household, according to the
families, are those offered by the Mexican Institute of Social Security
(Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social, or IMSS). IMSS provides medical,
educational, and childcare services, some of which are contingent on the
employment of a parent.[294]
Another program, the National Fund for Workers’ Housing (Instituto del
Fondo Nacional de la Vivienda para los Trabajadores, or INFONAVIT), which helps
working citizens obtain loans to buy homes, uses a system that deducts loan
repayments from workers’ wages, effectively requiring that a member of
the family who receives the loan be employed.[295]

According to dozens of families interviewed by Human Rights
Watch, when the family member upon whose job such services disappeared,
families found their access to certain programs at risk. Those who sought
exemptions to maintain their access to parts of IMSS, INFONAVIT, and other
programs conditional upon employment found themselves confronting an opaque and
slow-moving bureaucracy, which often failed to take into account their
exceptional circumstances. In order to maintain access to these services, or
recover it once it had been cut off, government officials told victims’
families they needed to obtain official recognition that the disappeared person
was missing or dead—a process that is costly, protracted, and aggravates
the suffering of the family.

The process by which a missing person is formally declared
“absent” and subsequently “presumed dead” is ill-suited
to formally recognize cases of disappearances and respond to the needs of
victims’ families. According to Mexico’s Federal Civil Code, when a
person has disappeared and his or her whereabouts remain unknown, a judge
summons the missing person (through advertisements in newspapers in the place
where he or she was last known to have lived, and in Mexican consulates) to
appear within no less than three months and no more than six months.[296]
If, at the end of that time, the disappeared person does not appear, the judge
appoints a “representative”—often a family member—who
may solicit a “declaration of absence” (declaración de
ausencia), formally recognizing the person is missing. The request may not
be submitted until two years after the representative has been appointed by the
judge.[297] The
representative’s petition is reviewed by a judge, who, if he finds the
claim well-founded, publishes the missing person’s name in newspapers, as
well as disseminates it to his last known address and consulates, in order to
seek information about the individual’s whereabouts. These efforts are
made every fifteen days for three months. If, four months after the last
attempted publication, there is still no news of the individual, the judge may
declare him “absent.”[298] From
the time a person disappears, therefore, according to the steps laid out in the
law, obtaining a “declaration of absence” takes a minimum of two
years and ten months.

The “presumption of death of the absent person”
(presunción
de muerte del ausente) may only be solicited six years after a declaration
of absence has been granted. It too requires a legal representative to submit
an application, and a judge to approve it.[299]
Therefore, under normal circumstances, the process of obtaining a certificate
of the presumption of death—which many government institutions request of
families in order to continue to provide access to key social services tied to
the victim’s employment—takes a minimum of eight years and ten
months after a person’s disappearance, according to the law.[300]
The cost of the lengthy process, which requires families to hire a lawyer, is
considerable, especially for poor families.

In addition, obligating a family to request that the
government declare a disappeared person dead forces relatives to settle on the
fate of a loved one whose whereabouts remain unknown, relatives told Human
Rights Watch, which exacerbates their suffering. In effect, families must
choose between a fate they do not believe is true and losing access to basic
services. According to the UN Working Group, “[a]s a general principle,
no victim of enforced disappearance shall be presumed dead over the objections
of the family.”[301]

Officials within government institutions whose job it is to
assist victims—such as the “Assistance to Victims”
(Atención a Víctimas) units in prosecutor’s offices and
officials from the newly created Prosecutor’s Office for Assistance to
Victims (Procuraduría Social de Atención a las Víctimas de
Delito, PROVÍCTIMA)—offered families little assistance in ensuring
that fundamental services for families were maintained.[302]

For example, when 20 men who worked for a
construction firm disappeared after being detained by municipal police in
Pesquería, Nuevo León, on May 28, 2011, their families faced
extreme difficulties in maintaining critical social services. The men had been
building the foundations for new homes prior to their disappearances. (For a
more detailed summary of the case, see previous chapter, “Complicity
between Security Forces and Organized Crime in Disappearances.”)

One of the men, 32, lived with his wife, 29, and their four
children, ages 10, 4, 3, and 1, in Reynosa, Tamaulipas.[303]
According to the wife, her husband’s disappearance put at risk the
welfare of their children. She said the construction firm that employed her
husband gave her and other families of the disappeared two payments of 800
pesos (approximately $60) after the workers went missing and then terminated
their employment.[304] In a
meeting with the owner and representatives of the company, the wife said that
she and other victims’ families had asked for additional support.
“How are our children going to eat?” one mother asked.[305]
The owner responded that the families should be grateful for what they had
received. “Do what you can to take care of yourselves,” the owner
said, according to the wife of another victim, who also attended the meeting.[306]
“The law doesn’t require me to do anything.”

The wife said that shortly after her husband’s work
was terminated she lost access to services tied to social security (IMSS),
including daycare for her young children.[307] She
also stopped receiving subsidies from INFONAVIT, she said, which had helped the
family make payments on their home—support that was conditional on her
husband’s employment. Officials from various government agencies told the
wife that if she wanted to regain access to those social services, she needed
to seek a “presumption of death” certificate for her husband.[308]

Yet seeking such recognition, she discovered, required
enlisting a lawyer to file a petition on her behalf—another expense for
which she did not have money. What’s more, requesting this classification
meant officially acknowledging that her husband was dead, something that she
said was psychologically very painful. She felt it betrayed her hope that he
was still alive and would signal to her husband that she had given up on
finding him. Nonetheless, she felt she had no other choice. “My children
are not going to eat from the hope of finding their father,” she said. “They
are at risk. I have to divide up a glass of milk between them.”[309]

The wife said she would have liked to have been able to
dedicate more time to searching for her husband and investigating his
disappearance—especially given the lackluster efforts of investigators in
the case—but she could not afford the expense, nor did she have any free
time between caring for her children and trying to make a living to provide for
them. She told Human Rights Watch:

I am making miracles every day to get by. People are
helping us survive. When my children want a can of juice, even that is
difficult, so I have to try to sell something. I earn very little every week.
They want to take away our home. My children are almost without food. Now they
are going to be without a roof.[310]

She said many of the other wives of the men who disappeared
in Pesquería who had small children were suffering the same hardships.

Retired military officer Ernesto Cordero Anguiano,
37, was one of eight men disappeared on December 6, 2010.[311]
The men were returning from a hunting trip in Zacatecas when they were detained
by municipal police and handed over to members of an organized crime group,
according to a man and a child who were abducted with them and escaped. Cordero
Anguiano was a military veteran and was receiving a pension at the time he
disappeared, which was his family’s primary source of income.[312]
Anguiano’s wife, Genny Romero Manrique, 39, said the Army would
not allow her to collect her husband’s pension soon after he disappeared.[313]
When she requested that the Army continue to provide the pension in light of
the fact that her husband had been disappeared, military authorities told her
she needed to obtain a “declaration of absence,” she said.[314]
She had initiated the legal process of seeking such recognition, but at the
time she spoke to Human Rights Watch in September 2012, had not received
recognition. When she stopped receiving her husband’s pension, she said,
she could no longer afford school tuition and was forced to move her children
to different schools.

The wife of a retired public school teacher in
Matamoros, Coahuila—whose husband disappeared in October 2008
after armed men abducted him from their home—said that she was unable to
obtain payments from his government pension (provided by ISSTE), because they
were made out to her husband.[315] She
said authorities told her that she needed to obtain a “presumption of
death” certificate in order to receive her husband’s pension.
However, she did not want to ask for such recognition, which she viewed as a
sign of giving up hope that her husband was alive. “How could I ever
explain that choice to him if he is found alive one day?” she said.[316]

The families affected were not limited to Mexico. For
example, five of the victims of disappearances documented by Human Rights Watch
had families in the US who were also significantly impacted by the violence. Geraldo
Acosta Rodríguez, 32, a naturalized US citizen from Mexico, ran a
warehouse for beauty products in Los Angeles, where he lived with his wife and
two daughters, 9 and 7.[317] In
August 2009, he returned to his native city of Saltillo, Coahuila, together
with his brother—Gualberto Acosta Rodríguez, 33, who also
lived in Los Angeles—to visit their sick mother in the hospital. Geraldo
and Gualberto were abducted on August 29, 2009, together with a third brother
who lived in Saltillo, Esteban Acosta Rodríguez, 34, and
Esteban’s 8-year-old son, BrandonEsteban Acosta Herrera.[318]
Geraldo’s wife had no experience running his business, which quickly
folded after his disappearance. As a result of the loss of his income, his
family could no longer make the payments on their home in California, which a
bank foreclosed upon.[319]

PROVÍCTIMA’s Shortcomings in Assisting
Families

The Special Prosecutor’s Office for Attention to
Victims of Crimes (la Procuraduría Social de Atención a las
Víctimas de Delitos, PROVÍCTIMA) was created in September 2011 to
assist victims of crime and their families, particularly people looking for
relatives who have disappeared.[320] The
main services that PROVÍCTIMA offers to victims, according to its
mandate, are: accompaniment in the search for missing people, medical
assistance, psychological assistance, legal advice, and social work.

The mandate of PROVÍCTIMA sets out worthy goals for
ensuring the rights and improving the welfare of victims, and its creation in
2011 demonstrated awareness on the part of the government that it needed to
improve its performance in these critical areas. According to PROVÍCTIMA,
from October 10, 2011 to November 27, 2012, it attended to 1,513 people who
reported relatives had disappeared, and “has contributed to the discovery
of 135 persons, 72 percent of them alive and 28 percent dead.”[321]
(Subsequent reporting cast doubt on whether the alleged victims had been
appropriately classified as disappeared, given the circumstances in which they
went missing.[322]) The
agency also said it had created a protocol of searching for disappeared or
missing persons that it had presented to 19 state prosecutor’s offices.[323]

Nonetheless, the majority of the relatives of the
disappeared interviewed by Human Rights Watch had not had any contact with
PROVÍCTIMA and had limited understanding of the services it offered.
Meanwhile, the more than 30 families who had sought the assistance of
PROVÍCTIMA uniformly said that its officials failed to fulfill concrete
commitments they had made to families—such as medical aid and small
business grants. In addition, in several cases, the psychological treatment offered
by PROVÍCTIMA exacerbated families’ emotional suffering by
pressuring them to accept that the disappeared were dead and that they should
stop searching for them, they told Human Rights Watch.

Roberto Oropeza Villa, 24, disappeared along with
11 coworkers from a paint selling company in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, in
March 2009.[324]
According to his mother, Yolanda Oropeza, 48, her health declined swiftly after
her son’s disappearance and she developed serious medical problems. She
said officials from PROVÍCTIMA told her they would assist her with the
costs of her medicine and an emergency operation to treat her hyperthyroidism.[325]
PROVÍCTIMA also promised to assist her in obtaining scholarship funds
for her grandchildren—Roberto’s two daughters—who were 8 and
6. But she said agency officials did not deliver on either commitment.
“They said they would help us, but it was cruel joke,” she said.
“If I had waited for them to help me get the medical treatment I needed,
I would be dead by now.”[326]

Pablo Bocanegra López,
57, whose son Alán Josué Bocanegra López, 19, was
disappeared along with seven friends on a hunting trip in Zacatecas in December
2010, said that PROVÍCTIMA had offered to provide him with psychological
treatment to cope with pain over the loss of his son.[327] (For a more detailed summary of the cases, see
previous chapter, “Complicity between Security Forces and Organized Crime
in Disappearances.”) He met with a PROVÍCTIMA social worker in
Mexico City in early 2012, and months later with another official from the
agency in Guanajuato. He said both officials tried to convince him to accept
that his son had died and “instead to focus on the sons who were still
alive,” an approach that contradicted his desire to keep searching for
his missing son.[328] As a result, he stopped attending meetings with
PROVÍCTIMA. The families of several of the men who disappeared on the
same hunting trip told Human Rights Watch that therapists and social workers
from PROVÍCTIMA gave them similar advice. As a result, in May 2012 Pablo
and the other relatives of disappeared hunters sent a joint letter to
PROVÍCTIMA renouncing all psychological assistance from the agency, they
said.[329]

Families of 22 disappeared men from the community of
San Luis de la Paz, Guanajuato— who were abducted along with their
smuggler in March 2011 as they attempted to travel to the United
States—described collective and individual meetings where representatives
of PROVÍCTIMA blamed the disappeared for their fate or insulted their
families.[330] Many
of the families who met with a PROVÍCTIMA psychologist said she told
them that the men had likely joined a criminal gang, or started a new
one—a conclusion she reached simply from the fact that the victims had
disappeared in a group.[331] The
psychologist advised the families to accept the fact that their loved ones were
dead, even though no remains had been found and the families wanted to continue
searching, the families said. PROVÍCTIMA officials also promised to
provide several mothers—who became the sole breadwinners in their
families after the disappearances of husbands and partners—with small
business grants and job opportunities, yet the families told Human Rights Watch
that only a few women received help.[332] When,
in a subsequent meeting, the wives and mothers of the disappeared expressed
frustration about the lack of job opportunities and grants, the
PROVÍCTIMA official accused the family members of being too lazy to work
and expecting the government to do everything for them.

María Angela Juárez Ramírez,
whose husband Valentín Alamilla Camacho was among the disappeared
men from San Luis de la Paz, said that an official noticed she was pregnant at
a meeting with representatives with PROVÍCTIMA several months after the
disappearances.[333] The
official commented that it seemed as though the wife had moved on very quickly
to a new partner after her husband’s disappearance. The wife responded
that she had been pregnant before her husband disappeared, and that in any case
it was insulting and inappropriate for the official to pass judgment like that.

A Promising New
Approach: the Case of Nuevo León

Nuevo León is one of the states that has registered
the greatest number of disappearances in recent years. According to a leaked
draft of a federal database of the disappeared, compiled by the Ministry of the
Interior and the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, authorities in Nuevo
León reported 636 disappearances between August 2006 and February 2012.[334]
A local human rights group based in Monterrey, Nuevo León—Citizens
in Support of Human Rights (Ciudadanos en Apoyo a los Derechos Humanos,
CADHAC)—received reports of 1,007 disappearances in the state from 2009
to the end of 2012.[335]

In 2010 and 2011, Human Rights Watch carried out several
fact-finding visits to Nuevo León to investigate abuses committed by
security forces. The climate of near-total impunity observed during those
visits was similar to what we had found in several other states of Mexico
affected by drug violence. Despite clear evidence of widespread abuses, state
authorities adamantly denied that such crimes had occurred, and failed to
prosecute the members of security forces who had committed them.[336]

As a result, victims and their families grew deeply
disillusioned with authorities. Not only was working with investigators
unlikely to produce results, but it also could be extremely dangerous, given
the criminal ties of many officials. For their part, even the most courageous
and well-intentioned prosecutors—operating in an environment of rampant
corruption—had almost no incentive to tackle these cases. In a vicious
cycle of distrust and dysfunction, the less that victims and authorities
collaborated in solving these crimes, the more entrenched the climate of
impunity became.

Then came the shift. Families of the disappeared, united by
a grassroots victims’ movement and partnered with a local human rights
group, collectively demanded that prosecutors begin to take the investigations
seriously. Under considerable pressure and media attention, state officials
received the families and agreed to work with them in investigating
disappearances. At first, both sides were distrustful. However, when
prosecutors—motivated by families to investigate and held accountable
when they did not—began to genuinely look into the crimes, they gradually
began to win back the trust of the victims’ relatives. And families, in
turn, began to collaborate more openly with prosecutors. The combination of
real efforts by prosecutors and the guiding hand of families gave rise to a new
dynamic, which allowed investigations to move forward for the first time in
years.

Progress in individual investigations, however small, made
it possible to believe that these horrific crimes, many of which appeared to
implicate state agents, could be solved. A virtuous cycle started to take the
place of a vicious one: the more prosecutors investigated, the more they earned
the trust of victims’ families, and the more investigations advanced. And
the more investigations advanced, the more other victims came forward. For
their part, prosecutors took the solid investigative tactics and skills they
learned working on one case or another and applied them to the rest of the
disappearances on their docket.

While progress in the
investigations has been limited, and very few of the disappeared have been
found, the step of breaking through a climate of disillusionment and distrust
is real. Indeed, in a decade of documenting flawed and lackluster
investigations of human rights violations in Mexico, the subset of cases in
Nuevo León represents one of the first times Human Rights Watch has ever
seen proper investigations. In that way, the working process in Nuevo
León provides a blueprint for how some of the greatest obstacles to
investigating not only disappearances, but all human rights violations in
Mexico, can be overcome.

This progress, though, is fragile and limited. Only a tiny
fraction of disappearances in Nuevo León have received such attention.
In addition, even in those investigations in which this unique collaborative
method has been applied, families have at times grown disillusioned by the
reality that many of their loved ones are still missing, and their fates
unknown. Furthermore, because the effort to pair families with prosecutors is
an ad hoc arrangement—one fully dependent on the good will of the
governor and the state prosecutor’s office—it could easily be
eliminated in a political transition, and the good practices and advances lost.

“Working Meetings”
between Victims’ Families, Human Rights Defenders, and the State
Prosecutor’s Office

The impetus for government officials, human rights
defenders, and victims’ families working together on investigating
disappearances was sparked by a visit to Monterrey by the Movement for Peace
with Justice and Dignity (Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad, hereafter
the Movimiento), a grassroots campaign made up of the victims of crimes
committed by both security forces and organized crime. The Movimiento organized
a “caravan” made up of families of victims that traveled around
Mexico in 2011. In each place where the “caravan” stopped, the
participants often held public meetings and rallies, where they were joined by
local victims and their families. When the “caravan” came to
Monterrey on June 7, 2011, approximately 300 people staged a rally outside city
hall to demand justice for victims of crimes and human rights violations.

In response, Nuevo León’s governor, Rodrigo
Medina de la Cruz, told Attorney General Adrián de la Garza to open the
doors of the state prosecutor’s office to receive the people who had
gathered for the rally.[337] Javier
Sicilia and Emilio Álvarez Icaza, two of the leaders of the Movimiento,
and Sister Consuelo Morales, who directs a local human rights group called
Citizens in Support of Human Rights (Ciudadanos en Apoyo a los Derechos
Humanos, CADHAC)—voiced the frustrations of many of those gathered with
the lack of investigation into disappearances and other crimes by local authorities.
Then, families of the disappeared began to present their cases to the attorney
general. Of all of those present, only 11 families were able to present their
cases that night. As a result, the attorney general agreed to meet with the
other victims’ families during the following month—together with
representatives from CADHAC and the Movimiento—and pledged to attend to
their cases.[338]

The first several meetings were collective ones. All of the
families and representatives of the Movimiento and CADHAC met with
representatives of the prosecutor’s office in a single room, and went
through the cases one by one. “First the prosecutor’s office would
go over the status of the investigation, and then the family would put forward
its questions, critiques and clarifications,” said Morales.[339]
“In these first meetings, the families were crying so much they almost
could not express their concrete demand for progress in the
investigations.” (“Primero exponía el
ministerio público el estatus de la averiguación previa, y luego
el familiar del caso emitía sus preguntas, reclamos o aclaraciones. En
estas primeras reuniones los familiares, lloraban y casi no lograban manifestar
su exigencia concreta de avance en las investigaciones.”) In
addition, all of the participants recognized that the system was inefficient:
in a full day, they could not make it through the majority of the cases, and
the families and prosecutors who were not involved in the case being discussed
were left to wait around until it was their turn.

As a result, the participants decided to change the
approach. The cases were divided up among the state prosecutor’s four
coordinators, each of whom directs investigations in a region of the state and
oversees the prosecutors who work there. According to the new format, each
family would meet individually with the prosecutor (agente del ministerio
público) assigned to investigating their case, and the regional
coordinator (coordinador) who was overseeing it. A human rights defender
from CADHAC would also attend every meeting. During the meetings, the
victim’s family, the human rights defender, and prosecutors would come up
with a list of tasks to advance the investigation, which the prosecutors would
in turn carry out in the subsequent weeks, and then report back on in the next
meeting. Often, these investigative tasks entailed pursuing basic lines of
inquiry which, prior to the “working meetings,” government
officials had ignored, such as interviewing witnesses or visiting crime scenes.
Building on the information obtained through these efforts, families and
investigators would come up with additional leads, thereby advancing the
investigation meeting by meeting.

Overcoming Distrust and
Strengthening Investigative Practices

Initially, according to all three groups of participants,
there was significant resistance to working together, driven by mutual
suspicion and distrust. Attorney General de la Garza described a climate of
“coldness” and “antagonism.”[340]
According to María del Mar Álvarez, a lawyer at CADHAC:

The authorities were not accustomed to having to account
for their efforts, much less letting other people review or question their
work. And we at CADHAC constantly distrusted authorities. The anger from the
families and CADHAC regarding the negligence and lack of interest with which
the investigations had been handled could be felt in the review of every case.
And the frustration expressed in the presentations of the prosecutors led to
moments of tension.[341]

After four or five meetings, however, distrust and
defensiveness on the part of the participants began to dissipate. One of the
keys to the breakthrough was that prosecutors actually began to investigate the
cases thoroughly and with greater urgency, which earned them greater trust from
families and human rights defenders.

Several prosecutors told Human Rights Watch that the shift
in the way they approached the cases came out of a new “moral
commitment,” which grew out of working side by side with the
victims’ relatives.[342]
“The commitment springs from being with the families. It makes you work
harder, and not just shoot off bureaucratic dispatches like you did in the
past,” said coordinator Eduardo Ayala Garza, who oversaw one of the four
groups of prosecutors.[343]
Another coordinator told Human Rights Watch, “We had to put ourselves in
their shoes—to experience the case not only from the point of view of the
authority, but also from the perspective of the victim.”[344]

This perspective was critical, human rights defenders said,
to prosecutors breaking with the common practice of preemptively blaming the
victim. “Before, the case file just had the family’s complaint in
it, nothing more,” said coordinator María de la Luz Balderas
Rodríguez. “There were no witness testimonies. No evidence. I
would just read the cases and file them away.”[345]
When the meetings with families began, she said, she looked for the gaps in the
investigation, sought new leads, and encouraged investigators she oversaw to
fill them in. Prosecutors became more thorough in completing rudimentary
steps—from tracing victims’ cell phones to interviewing key
witnesses—that had long been overlooked, and uncovered new leads they had
previously missed.

Trust was also built through collaboration between
prosecutors and human rights defenders. The attorney general gave
CADHAC’s staff full access to the victims’ case files, which the
organization’s lawyers started to review closely and use to make informed
recommendations regarding gaps in the investigations. Here, again, initial
resistance on the part of prosecutors gave way to a stronger working rapport. “The
prosecutors started to realize that [the review] was not a form of aggression,
but rather that we were in search of the truth and trying to find the same
people,” said Consuelo Morales of CADHAC.[346]
The outcome, according to prosecutors and human rights defenders, was a gradual
shift towards more thorough, transparent investigations.

When victims’ families started to see prosecutors
making real efforts to find their loved ones, they gained confidence in
officials and grew more willing to collaborate with them and provide
suggestions for leads, which in turn helped open new leads for investigators.
“After we started to work the cases one-by-one, the people began to trust
us more. They started to tell us things,” said coordinator Roman Sabino
Loredo Esquivel.[347]
“The families used to be afraid that we would not investigate if we knew
there were criminal ties regarding the victim or those responsible,” said
another prosecutor. “Now they see that is not true.”[348]
The same was true for members of CADHAC. “The working meetings ceased
being a place to fight over power, and instead became a place of a joint search
for solutions to shared problems. It became clear that we were all pursuing the
same objective,” said Álvarez from CADHAC.[349]

Prosecutors and human rights defenders made other changes to
the dialogue process to improve the effectiveness of investigations. They
decided to meet collectively at the beginning of each day of “working
meetings” to set out group goals, and then at the end of the day to
identify chronic challenges and patterns across cases. In addition, prosecutors
and human rights defenders eventually started to meet collectively a week
before each monthly “working meeting,” in order to review the
individual case files. These added meetings helped prosecutors identify
possible links between cases, such as disappearances that seemed to implicate
the same officials or criminal cells. Furthermore, putting all the coordinators
and defenders together allowed them to share best investigative practices and
ideas to overcome common obstacles, such as the most effective way to compel
telephone companies to provide the cell phone records of victims, coordinators
said.[350]
Finally, the meetings provided another joint oversight mechanism that helped
ensure prosecutors were fulfilling their duties.

Institutional Reforms

The Nuevo León Attorney General’s office also
made several important institutional reforms to strengthen prosecutors’
investigative capacity. One was drafting a prosecutor’s manual—a protocolo—for
investigating enforced disappearances. At this writing, the manual is still a
work in progress. Yet it shows a serious effort on the part of the
prosecutor’s office to systematize fundamental steps that should be
undertaken in searching for victims and those responsible.

According to the
attorney general, the manual was developed in response to a key lesson learned
in the “working meetings”: namely, that the period immediately
following a disappearance is crucial to the investigation. “What we
learned is that if the first inquiries are done well, it helps the
investigation considerably,” said Attorney General de la Garza.[351]

The manual is essential to ensuring that the institutional
knowledge and good practices that have been developed by the current attorney
general, coordinators, and prosecutors are passed along to their successors. As
one coordinator said, “There used to be more mistakes by our side. We
didn’t ask for the numbers of the victims’ cell phones or register
missing vehicles. We didn’t look for security cameras. Now all of that is
done by default.”[352]

A second key reform was an amendment to the state’s
penal code to criminalize enforced disappearances, which were previously not a
crime in Nuevo León. Legislators in Nuevo León’s Congress
approved the reform in November 2012—after months of working with the UN
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Mexico, Human Rights Watch,
local human rights defenders, and victims’ families—and with the
full support of the state prosecutor’s office.[353]
The legislation, which was signed into law by Governor Medina in December,[354]
resolved inaccuracies and omissions in earlier drafts which would not have been
consistent with Mexico’s commitments under international human rights
treaties.[355] For
example, earlier drafts of the reform did not allow for sanctioning authorities
who authorized or contributed to enforced disappearances through complicity or
acquiescence; rather, they limited accountability to officials who participated
directly in enforced disappearances. Besides failing to comply with
international standards, this overly narrow definition would have greatly
limited the ability of prosecutors to investigate authorities who had full
knowledge that enforced disappearances were taking place and failed to do
something. This mistake was corrected in the reform that was signed into law in
December.

A third key reform narrowed the overly broad definition of in
flagrante delicto detentions in Nuevo León’s criminal
procedural code, which helped give rise to conditions in which enforced
disappearances are more likely to occur. In flagrante detentions (detención
por flagrancia in Mexican law) are allegedly carried out when a perpetrator
is caught in the act of committing a crime, and unlike other arrests may be
performed without first obtaining a judicial warrant.[356]
Until December 2012, Nuevo León’s criminal procedural code allowed
individuals to be detained por flagrancia up to 60 hours after a crime
had been committed.[357] This
definition fit a general pattern in Mexico, whereby authorities use an overly
broad—and in many cases manifestly absurd—interpretation of what
constitutes the time period “immediately after” a crime to carry
out flagrancia arrests. Then, to justify such arrests, officials often
point to ambiguous, subjective signs that neither tie suspects to specific
crimes nor merit immediate detention.[358] Such
definitions give security forces disproportionate discretion that may result in
arbitrary arrests, fostering conditions in which enforced disappearances are
more likely to occur. In a December 2012, state legislators in Nuevo
León reformed the law to remove the provision allowing for flagrancia
detentions up to 60 hours after the crime occurred.[359]

A fourth key reform was the attorney general’s
appointment in early 2012 of five judicial police to work exclusively on cases
of disappearances. Judicial police carry out field investigations for
prosecutors through activities such as canvassing for witnesses and visiting
crime scenes. Prosecutors told Human Rights Watch in October 2012 that the
appointed police had proved much more competent and trustworthy than other
judicial police, and that they were developing genuine expertise in
investigating disappearances. In November 2012, de la Garza doubled the team to
10 judicial police, and he has said he plans to add more in 2013.

Results from Better
Investigations

Improvements in investigative methods and institutional
reforms have led to concrete advances in the investigations of cases of
disappearances. Since the “working meetings” began, state
prosecutors have charged 52 suspects in seven investigations tied to disappearances.[360]
Seven cases out of fifty is only a modest proportion of cases with suspects
charged, and charging people does not necessarily mean they committed the crime
in question or will eventually be found guilty by a judge. Nonetheless,
compared to the period prior to the “working meetings”—when
prosecutors did little to investigate hundreds of reported disappearances, and
not a single disappearance case had resulted in a suspect being
charged—this represents a dramatic shift.

Moreover, even in cases incorporated in the “working
meetings” in which no suspects have been charged, families told Human
Rights Watch that since they began the process, prosecutors had taken real
steps to pursue leads and search for their loved ones—something that had
never happened before. For these families, seeing prosecutors take basic
investigative steps—summoning suspects for questioning, canvassing for
witnesses in the places where their loved ones had been abducted, leading raids
on suspected “safe houses, or pressing telephone companies to hand over
victims’ cell phone records—showed them that investigators were
approaching cases with a renewed sense of urgency, purpose, and competence. And
for both victims’ families and prosecutors, seeing any results—be
it a new lead or a disqualified hypothesis—has been critical to breaking
through a climate of disillusionment and inertia—and given them a sense
that such cases can actually be solved, and perhaps the missing people found.

For example, Israel Arenas Durán, 17,
Adrián Nava Cid, 23, and brothers Gabriel and Reynaldo
García Álvarez—who worked at a plant nursery in
Juárez, Nuevo León—disappeared on the night of June 17,
2011, after going for drinks at a bar.[361] That
night, Israel Arenas had called his brother from the bar and asked him to bring
extra money so he could pay a tab. On his drive to the bar, Arenas’s
brother saw him being loaded into a police vehicle, unit 131. Arenas’s
parents promptly went to the police station, but police denied having detained
him.[362] His
parents filed a complaint with the state prosecutor’s office on June 20.

The investigation of the disappearance of Arenas and his
three friends was initially assigned to a subdivision of the state
prosecutor’s office specializing in crimes by officials. Prosecutors
detained one police officer assigned to the patrol unit identified by
Arenas’s brother. And—after Arenas’s father saw a man driving
his son’s missing car and directed police to the individual’s
location—prosecutors detained a second suspect (who, it turned out, was
formerly a police officer).[363] But
when it came to taking initiative to investigate the case, Arenas’s
family said, the prosecutors did next to nothing, pursuing only those leads
provided by the family. Moreover, the victims’ relatives said,
prosecutors made little effort to build cases against the two men they had
detained.

When the “working meetings” began, the
disappearance of Arenas and his three friends was among the first cases to be
incorporated. In October 2011, a new prosecutor was assigned to the case, and a
coordinator, Eduardo Ayala, was tasked with overseeing it. In the initial
meetings, the victims’ families and human rights defenders from CADHAC
provided the prosecutor’s office with concrete suggestions for leads to
pursue, most of which had been overlooked by the previous investigators.[364]
One of the families’ most insistent demands was that prosecutors question
the owner and staff of the bar where Israel and his friends had gone for drinks
on the night they were abducted—something the previous investigators
assigned to the case had never done, despite repeated requests by the families.

When prosecutors carried out this basic step, they uncovered
critical new information. Upon investigating the bar where the four men had
been the night they were abducted, the coordinator in charge of the case told
Human Rights Watch, investigators found signs that pointed to collaboration
between the bar owner and organized crime. Investigators eventually summoned
the owner and workers from the bar for questioning, and confirmed that the four
victims had been there on the night they disappeared. They also discovered that
the victims and the owner had gotten into an argument over the bill, which
ended with the four men leaving the bar. This lead, in conjunction with
questioning the police officer who Arenas’s brother had seen detain him
on the night he disappeared, helped investigators piece together a motive in
the case: a dispute between the four men and the bar’s owner had led the
owner to call on a criminal group to intervene, and members of that group had
told corrupt police to detain the four men as they drove away from the bar and
hand them over.[365] The
case pointed to a sinister collaboration between a criminal group and local
police.

While the remains of the
victims have not been found and suspects in the crime are awaiting trial, the
case has advanced since prosecutors began to work with the victims’
families. Three suspects have been formally charged in the crime and are
awaiting trial, additional suspects have been detained, and investigators have
pieced together a credible motive in the crime, which may eventually help
determine the fate of the disappeared men. Many of these advances came directly
out of investigators working with the victims’ families.

Similarly, in the case of Agnolo Pabel Medina Flores—who
was taken from his home in Guadalupe, Nuevo León, by armed men on August
2, 2010—the “working meetings” led to significant advances in
an investigation that had previously languished.[366]
Medina’s family waited two months to report his disappearance, out of
hope of negotiating his release with his captors and fear of reprisals if they
spoke with authorities.[367] His
mother eventually filed a complaint in October 2010, but she said prosecutors
and law enforcement officials did virtually nothing to investigate, and she
lost confidence in officials.[368]

In July 2011, Medina’s case was one of the 50 that
state prosecutors began to investigate in conjunction with families and CADHAC,
and the investigation began to advance.[369] The
coordinator overseeing the investigation said that at first the family was
distrustful of the prosecutor assigned to the case—given their negative
previous experiences—and reluctant to share information.[370]
Yet after several “working meetings” in which they observed real
efforts by investigators, family members began to share information that opened
new leads in the investigation. For example, the family revealed that
Medina’s abductors had stolen his Nextel radio, which emits a GPS signal,
and that the family had tracked the radio’s location. They handed over a
map of the signals to prosecutors.[371]

State investigators also carried out basic steps that
previous investigators had neglected, such as interviewing possible witnesses
from the night of the detention. One of those interviewed told investigators
that she saw police cars from the transit police of the town of Guadalupe
outside of Medina’s home when he was abducted.[372]
The witness was able to identify one of the police officers who was there based
on photographs provided by the prosecutor’s office. The officer was
detained by judicial police in September 2012.[373]

The victim’s family also provided information they had
previously withheld about friends of Medina’s who were likely involved in
the disappearance. As a result of these and other critical pieces of
information that emerged as a result of the “working meetings,”
prosecutors were eventually able to charge two additional suspects in the
disappearance. Medina’s whereabouts remain unknown.[374]

Even in several disappearance cases where prosecutors have
not yet charged suspects or determined the fate of the missing people, they
have made advances through solid fact-finding work, such as disqualifying
certain suspects, identifying others, or determining the last locations where
victims were seen or their final phone calls. Human Rights Watch observed
meetings between prosecutors, victims’ families, and local human rights
defenders in more than a dozen disappearance cases in 2012. In each case,
prosecutors reported back to the families on a series of investigative tasks
they had been assigned in their previous meeting. Where new leads had emerged,
they shared them with the families and agreed on next steps. And where other
leads failed to produce new information, they informed families. The tone of
the discussion was constructive and allowed the families to ask questions and
make suggestions. In the few instances where investigators had failed to
complete tasks they had been assigned, or had performed them inadequately, they
were held to book by both families and the coordinators.

Remaining Challenges
and Shortcomings

For all of the progress that has been made in investigating
disappearances in Nuevo León, the challenges that remain to effectively
investigating disappearances and finding those who have gone missing are
daunting.

One of the most persistent obstacles to the efforts of
prosecutors, human rights defenders, and families investigating disappearances
is the lack of cooperation, competence, and trustworthiness of other
authorities whose input is crucial to investigations. These include corrupt
local police who obstruct investigations, federal prosecutors who refuse to
provide state investigators with access to federal detainees who may have
relevant information to cases, and authorities from neighboring states who fail
to fulfill basic information requests.

For instance, a prosecutor told Human Rights Watch that he
had repeatedly asked officials from a neighboring municipal police department
to provide him with the patrol records (which indicate the officers who were
working on a given day) for a night when a disappearance had occurred.[375]
Witnesses interviewed by the prosecutor suggested that police had abducted the
victims, and the prosecutor wanted to determine which officers had been on duty
that night, so that he could call them in for questioning. For two months,
despite repeated requests, police officials refused to provide the prosecutor
with the patrol records for that night. When he called to insist, they said
they would send them along immediately, only to then delay further. Eventually,
the attorney general called police to demand the records for the
prosecutor—and still police officials failed to send them. When,
approximately three months after they were requested, the records were
eventually handed over, the prosecutor identified the two officers who had been
on duty during the night of the disappearance. However, when he told the police
he wanted to question the two officers, he was told that they had quit
suddenly, one week earlier.[376] The
officers had fled town and the prosecutor has been unable to locate them ever
since.

Another challenge in the “working meetings” is
that some families have grown frustrated with the limited progress in their
investigations and stopped cooperating with prosecutors. Accustomed to
incompetent, apathetic efforts by authorities, some families interpret the fact
that their relatives have not been found as a result of prosecutors’ lack
of effort or shortcomings—rather than a reflection of disappearances
being very complex crimes to solve. Investigating the cases is further
obstructed by the fact that many of these cases were abandoned by prosecutors
for months or even years before the “working meetings”
began—a period during which some evidence was irrevocably lost. Given the
severe hardship and history of setbacks with authorities endured by families
who have lost a loved one, such disillusionment is understandable. Nonetheless,
it makes investigating challenging cases even more difficult. Said one
prosecutor, “For the families, even if there are people charged in the
crime, we know that finding the disappeared is the most important part. It is
clear to me that our efforts will never be sufficient so long as I can’t
find [their relatives].”[377]

Perhaps the greatest challenge that remains is applying the
investigative practices learned through collaborating with families and human
rights defenders in the “working meetings” to the hundreds more
disappearances in Nuevo León, including new cases that continue to be
reported. While the state’s deputy attorney general told Human Rights
Watch that all cases of reported disappearances receive the same attention as
the working group,[378] our
research showed that the quality of investigations for cases incorporated in
the “working meetings” was significantly higher than it was for
those not included. In part, this is the result of limited resources. At
current staffing levels—and with crime rates as high as they are in Nuevo
León—it would be impossible for prosecutors to dedicate the same
amount of attention to hundreds of additional disappearances.

Even so, in several investigations carried out by state
prosecutors since the “working meetings” began, prosecutors and law
enforcement officials repeated some of the same chronic and preventable
mistakes, such as failing to immediately open investigations in reported cases,
neglecting to trace victims’ cell phones in the days after a
disappearance, or dispatching families to inquire about their whereabouts with
security forces. Human rights defenders from CADHAC confirmed that many of the
disappearances they have registered that have not been included in the
“working meetings”—approximately 150 cases in
all—reveal many of the same flaws and omissions on the part of
prosecutors and law enforcement officials. These errors continue to undermine
efforts to punish those responsible, find missing persons, and prevent
disappearances from occurring. Not surprisingly, some families whose cases have
not been included in the “working meetings” have perceived this
disparity, and are increasingly frustrated by what they perceive to be a
two-tier system, where the cases that receive proper attention are limited to the
ones monitored by human rights defenders and coordinators.

An Alternative Approach: the Case of Coahuila

Nuevo León is one of a
handful of states where families of the disappeared and civil society groups
have successfully pressed authorities to develop new strategies to address the
problem of disappearances. In the neighboring state of Coahuila—driven in
large part by a coalition of victims’ families called United Efforts for
Our Disappeared (Fuerzas Unidas por Nuestros Desaparecidos en Coahuila,
FUUNDEC)—the state government has taken steps to develop a plan to search
for disappeared persons, investigate their cases, and assist their families.
While this report does not evaluate the efforts in Coahuila with the same
degree of detail as those in Nuevo León—owing in large measure to
the fact that the government’s efforts in the former state are not yet as
advanced—distinct strengths and weaknesses have emerged in
Coahuila’s approach.

Coahuila’s governor,
Rubén Moreira, has publicly recognized the scope of the problem, and the
state government’s responsibility to address to it, on multiple
occasions. In January 2012, a month after taking office, he acknowledged
publicly that more than 1,600 people had disappeared in Coahuila since 2007.[379]In a public
event on March 28 of that year with the UN Working Group on Enforced or
Involuntary Disappearances, he recognized that “authorities from the
Mexican government lack a comprehensive policy to confront the phenomena of
enforced disappearances.”[380]And when
Human Rights Watch met with a range of state officials in Saltillo, Coahuila in
April 2012—including the state attorney general, the head of public
security, prosecutors, and the governor—all offered a frank assessment of
the challenges they faced and the state failure to address the issue for
several years.

The state government has
taken steps to address the problem, at times in collaboration with civil
society. In January 2012, Governor Moreira created a special prosecutor’s
office for the disappeared (Subprocuraduría para la
Investigación y Búsqueda de Personas No Localizadas), and put
forward a proposal for a statewide plan to tackle the problem. In these
endeavors, the state government has collaborated—sometimes
enthusiastically, other times reluctantly—with the families of
disappeared persons and international organizations. For instance, on April 14,
Governor Moreira pledged to implement all of the recommendations falling within
the state’s purview that had been issued by the UN Working Group. To
oversee that implementation, the state government agreed to create a
“working group” (grupo de trabajo) of its own, made up of
representatives of the state government, families of the disappeared, local
organizations, and the UN, who have since met several times with the aim of
jointly designing a strategy to implement those and other key recommendations.

Unfortunately, the Coahuila
government has at times fallen short in its implementation of these important
pledges. For example, in January 2012, Coahuila state legislators reformed the
state criminal code to add the crime of enforced disappearance—a crucial
step to effectively prosecute these cases. However, the definition of enforced
disappearance included in the criminal code is not consistent with
international human rights standards—a consequence, in part, of the
failure of local authorities to rely on the text of international treaties that
Mexico has signed and ratified.[381]Among its
many flaws, the new provision establishes an overly narrow definition of what
constitutes an enforced disappearance, failing to include disappearances that
are carried out by private persons with the acquiescence of state agents. Nor
is the new provision explicit, as international standards stipulate, that
enforced disappearances are continuing crimes and any statutes of limitations
placed on their prosecution should not begin to run until the crime is complete
(i.e., the fate of the disappeared person is resolved), and, even then, should
apply only for a duration proportionate
to the seriousness of the crime.

In contrast to efforts in the
state of Nuevo León, according to families of the disappeared,
representatives of FUUNDEC, and some prosecutors from Coahuila assigned to the
special prosecutor’s office, investigations into reported disappearances
in Coahuila to date have made little progress, and the new initiatives have yet
to foster a more constructive working dynamic between investigators and
victims’ families.

Human Rights Watch presented the findings of its report on
abuses that have marred Mexico’s counter-narcotics operations, Neither
Rights Nor Security, to President Calderón and key members of his
cabinet on November 9, 2011, together with a set of recommendations for how his
administration could address the abuses in its final year in power.[382]
In response, President Calderón told Human Rights Watch that his
administration would review every case documented in the report, as well as the
subsequent investigation (or lack thereof) of those cases, to determine whether
authorities had committed human rights violations. He also said his
administration would review and consider all of the general recommendations in
the report. Calderón proposed creating a joint commission with Human
Rights Watch to fulfill these commitments, which we accepted.

On November 10, Human Rights Watch met with officials from
the Foreign Ministry to discuss the mandate of the commission. We agreed to
share full documentation of the individual human rights violations documented
in Neither Rights Nor Security with the aim of advancing their
investigation, and to advise the government on implementing the report’s
general recommendations. The officials said they would invite Human Rights
Watch for an initial meeting in December to begin the commission’s work.

In the following months, the Calderón administration
sent contradictory messages on human rights. On the one hand, in a December 9
speech, President Calderón announced that he was taking several steps
that corresponded directly to recommendations we had made, including: ordering
security forces to immediately transfer detainees, including those detained in
flagrante, to civilian prosecutors; instructing security forces to make
public and, where necessary, establish laws on use of force, detention
protocol, and preservation of evidence; and developing an inter-governmental
federal database for the “disappeared.”[383]

Approximately a month later, however, the head of the
Ministry of the Interior, Secretary Alejandro Poiré, sent a letter to
Human Rights Watch attacking the report from which those recommendations came,
and the conclusions which Calderón had largely accepted in a meeting
with Human Rights Watch. The letter dismissed the conclusions of Neither
Rights Nor Security by claiming they were based on “multiple
imprecisions and unsubstantiated assertions,”[384]
a claim the secretary reiterated in two press conferences later that month. For
example, Poiré alleged that the report contained “errors”
and that it made “categorical and generalized assertions…that do
not reflect the real situation in Mexico”—allegations he said were
proved in a letter he had sent to Human Rights Watch.[385]

After a careful review of the letter, we found that none of
Poiré’s criticisms of our report withstand scrutiny. In a detailed
response Human Rights Watch sent to Poiré (reproduced in annex of this
report) on March 1, 2012, we rebutted each of his allegations.[386]
For example, Poiré criticized our report’s use of the term
“war on drugs,” calling it “an imprecision that gives rise to
many others.”[387]
However, as we pointed out in our response, the reason we employed the
term—always in quotes—was because it was commonly used by the
Calderón administration to refer to its counter-narcotics efforts. We
cited more than 50 occasions on which President Calderón had directly
referred to his public security strategy as a “war” on drug
traffickers or organized crime, most of which we accessed on the
president’s official website.

Poiré’s letter also objected to our claim that
torture was a “systematic” problem in the five states where we
conducted our research.[388]
However, as detailed in our response, we found evidence that torture occurred
in all the states we examined, the perpetrators using the same specific methods
(electric shocks, waterboarding, and asphyxiation), under similar circumstances
(after the victim had been detained allegedly “in flagrante” or
without detention orders), in the same types of venues (military bases and
police stations), and for the same purpose (to coerce confessions or obtain
information). We had good reason for concluding that the practice was
systematic.

In addition, Poiré expressed “lament”
that “neither the federal government nor any Mexican authority was even
informed of the accusations against them, to say nothing of being given the
opportunity to provide their version of the facts.”[389]
On the contrary, as we noted in our response, during our investigation we
consistently sought meetings with the relevant authorities in order to obtain
their versions of events. Representatives of Human Rights Watch met with
officials from the Federal Police, Federal Prosecutor’s Office, the Army,
the Ministry of Interior—as well as state and municipal
officials—to discuss the individual cases and broader patterns of abuse.
All of these authorities were duly cited throughout the report. Where official
accounts were lacking, we argued, it was due to the fact that some authorities
either refused to respond to our queries, or provided incomplete or false
information when they did.

These and other unfounded allegations, Human Rights Watch
argued, could well be construed as evidence that the Calderón
administration was not taking seriously its legal obligation to investigate and
punish the human rights violations documented in our report. Nevertheless, in
the interest of obtaining justice for the victims whose cases we had documented
and helping spur development of a public security strategy that would help
reduce such widespread human rights violations, Human Rights Watch expressed
its willingness to continue working with the government on the commission. To
this end, representatives of Human Rights Watch met twice with Poiré in
March and April 2012.

In the March meeting, officials from the Ministry of the
Interior and the Federal Prosecutor’s Office representing the government
side of the commission demonstrated a failure to grasp basic information about
the cases documented in the report. For example, officials presented Human Rights
Watch with a list that they said contained every case mentioned in Neither
Rights Nor Security, for which they claimed to have assembled up to date
information on whether investigations had been opened, and if so, what their
status was. However, the list excluded scores of cases from the report, which
Human Rights Watch identified for the officials, notably including 57 cases of
torture that were not featured on the list.

In addition, for those cases that were included on the list,
the supposed “up to date” information on investigations was marked
by numerous errors and omissions, such as wrongly identifying where abuses had
occurred, which security forces were alleged to have committed them, and
whether investigations had been opened. For example, in dozens of cases,
ministry officials claimed that no investigations had been opened into cases
for which Neither Rights Nor Security had cited investigations by
number, date, and investigative body. These included the case of a woman who
was allegedly sexually assaulted and tortured by police in Cárdenas,
Tabasco, for which Human Rights Watch’s report had cited the
investigation case file, the victim’s official testimony before the state
prosecutor’s office, arrest orders, official medical reports, and a complaint
before the Tabasco State Human Rights Commission.[390]What’s more, nearly four months since the publication of the
report, in none of the cases were government officials on the commission able
to point to progress in the investigation and prosecution of state actors
implicated in the documented abuses.

Subsequent exchanges with officials on the commission
reflected a similar lack of due diligence. For example, in May 2012 officials
from the Ministry of the Interior sent Human Rights Watch two lists of victims
whose cases were documented in Neither Rights Nor Security or provided
to officials by Human Rights Watch in later meetings.[391]
One was a list, according to officials, of “victims for whom there is no
record of an investigation” by military, federal, or state prosecutors,
while the other was a list of “victims who are only cited in
investigations as the presumed offenders,” rather than as victims.[392]

However, as Human Rights Watch pointed out in a June letter
to Poiré, the lists included cases for which—contrary to the
government’s claims—investigations had been opened, demonstrating a
serious failure to collect accurate information on the part of the ministry.
Specifically, the Ministry of the Interior claimed that investigations into
alleged human rights violations had not been opened into the cases of 67
victims whose names were included on lists it sent to Human Rights Watch.
However, in more than a dozen of those cases, Human Rights Watch had provided
information—both in Neither Rights Nor Security and in subsequent
meetings with authorities—of open complaints or investigations by
federal, state and/or military prosecutors. For instance, the ministry claimed
there was no investigation open into the enforced disappearance and
extrajudicial killing of four civilians—Juan Carlos Chavira, Dante
Castillo, Raúl Navarro, and Felix Vizcarra—by municipal police in
Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, in March 2011.[393]
As noted in Neither Rights Nor Security, and reiterated in March and
April meetings with the Ministry of the Interior, three police officers were
charged by the Chihuahua state prosecutor’s office in the case. The case
had also been covered in the press at that time.[394]
Information regarding this and other cases could easily have been obtained by
the Ministry of the Interior from public databases or through inquiries by the
ministry with relevant justice officials.[395]

The ministry’s May 2012 communiqué also said
that, for some of the cases contained in Neither Rights Nor Security, no
criminal investigations had been opened by prosecutors. In other words,
approximately six months after Human Rights Watch provided federal and state
authorities with compelling evidence of serious human rights violations,
prosecutors had failed to open investigations into scores of them. This implies
a serious lapse on the part of authorities. Either officials from the
Calderón administration and the governors of the five states covered by
the report—who were provided with copies of the report—failed to
fulfill their obligation to pass on credible reports of crimes to prosecutors,[396]
or they reported the alleged crimes and prosecutors failed to open
investigations into them.

Over the course of Human Rights Watch’s meetings with
the commission, representatives of the Ministry of the Interior failed to
provide evidence of a single case from more than 230 human rights violations
documented in Neither Rights Nor Security in which
prosecutors—federal, state, or military—had demonstrated meaningful
progress in the investigation and prosecution of the state actors alleged to
have committed serious crimes.

Failure of the Federal Government to Develop
National Databases of the Disappeared and Unidentified Remains

The Importance of Registries of the Disappeared and
Unidentified Bodies to Searches and Investigations

Human Rights Watch has repeatedly called on the federal
government to establish a comprehensive national database of the disappeared that
includes data to help identify and search for missing persons. It is critical
that such a database include all relevant physical information about the
victims (such as gender, age, height, scars, tattoos, and DNA from relatives),
as well as information that could be useful in determining a person’s
whereabouts (such as cell phone numbers and the last place the person was
seen).

In addition, we have recommended the government create a
searchable registry of unidentified bodies, which would also include all
relevant physical information in a standardized, easy-to-use format. Where
possible, this registry should include the same informational categories as the
database of the disappeared, in order to maximize the ease and utility of
comparing the two databases, and to search for matches between missing persons
and unidentified remains. For the information contained in both lists to be
useful, the criteria for collecting such data should be identical across
prosecutors’ offices, human rights commissions, morgues, and other
relevant institutions that will have access to the data and input new cases.
Similar recommendations have also been made by the UN Working Group on Enforced
Disappearances, among other institutions.[397]

A primary reason for
establishing a comprehensive, accurate database of the disappeared is that it
is a crucial tool for searching for disappeared people at the national level.
For example, the names in the database could be checked against the records of hospitals,
morgues, prisons, and border crossings around Mexico. At present, when a family
member reports a disappearance in a given state, local authorities do not have
a system to efficiently transmit the missing person’s information to
other authorities and relevant institutions elsewhere. Consequently, most
authorities who receive complaints do not share the information at all, while
those who do attempt to share it lack a systematic protocol that would help
them to determine what information to share and with whom to share it. Instead
they take an ad hoc approach, in the best cases having to transmit notices
individually to all 32 federal entities and federal institutions—an
inefficient process.

Furthermore, if the government were to develop a registry of
the disappeared in conjunction with a database of unidentified bodies or
remains—and the two databases included uniform, comprehensive, and
reliable information that could be used to identify individuals (such as DNA,
tattoos, and other physical characteristics)—the registries could be used
to match unidentified remains with missing people. Mexico’s National
Human Rights Commission registered more than 6,100 unidentified bodies from
January 2007 to December 2011.[398] It is
reasonable to presume that hundreds if not thousands of these remains belong to
individuals whose families have reported them as disappeared, and are currently
searching for them. However, while the federal government has proven its
capacity to set up national databases of stolen cars and of police officers
with criminal records, it has failed to set up similar registries for the
disappeared or unidentified bodies.

Due to the lack of these federal registries, families who
want to search for their loved ones at a national level are forced to travel
from state to state leading their own searches. For example, families go to
other state prosecutors’ offices to provide their DNA, in hopes that they
can be checked against local registries of unidentified bodies found in mass
graves. It is not uncommon for victims’ families to travel to faraway
states when new mass graves are discovered, in order to provide their DNA to
local prosecutors to be checked against the remains. These relatives make such
journeys, they told Human Rights Watch, because prosecutors in their own states
have informed them there is no way to transmit genetic data across states.
Similarly, families routinely visit hospitals, prisons, and morgues to inquire
after their loved ones. Such journeys are costly, time-consuming, and often
dangerous, and they exact a high emotional toll on families, whose hopes are
raised each time that they might finally find the remains of loved ones.

Flaws and Delays in Efforts by the Calderón
Government to Develop National Registries

In spite of clear evidence of mounting disappearances,
indications that federal and state governments lack the tools to coordinate
investigations at a national level, and the recommendations of monitoring
organizations, the Calderón administration for years did not attempt to
set up a national database of the disappeared.

Then, on December 9, 2011 President Calderón publicly
committed to creating a national database of the disappeared and a searchable
registry of unidentified bodies. “It is essential for us to advance the
development of many tools that exist, but that must be strengthened,” he
said.[399]
“The registry of DNA of the dead and the database of missing
people… are indispensable instruments for finding them.” He
instructed his secretary of the interior to develop the databases as swiftly as
possible with the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, PROVÍCTIMA, and the
National Human Rights Commission.[400] On
February 3, 2012, Calderón repeated this public pledge, and said that
the Federal Prosecutor’s Office had asked governors from all of
Mexico’s states to cooperate with these efforts.[401]
He said the national databases would be finished in the first or second
trimester of 2012. In an April meeting with Human Rights Watch, Secretary of
the Interior Alejandro Poiré told Human Rights Watch that the databases
were “90 percent complete” and would be finished by the end of the
month.[402]

In March 2012, Congress passed the Law of the National
Registry of Missing or Disappeared Persons (Ley del Registro Nacional de Datos
de Personas Extraviadas o Desaparecidas), which entered into force on April 17.[403]
The law obligates officials to systematize key data for “missing”
and “disappeared” persons—including their age, sex, and place
of origin and disappearance—in a single national registry.[404]
According to the law, a missing person is defined as someone who, “due to
circumstances beyond their control, does not recall their personal information,
identity, or address.”[405]
Meanwhile, a disappeared person is defined as someone who, “based on
credible information provided by family members, close friends or
acquaintances, has been reported as missing according to domestic law. This may
be related to an international or non-international armed conflict, an internal
situation of violence or civil disorder, a natural disaster, or any other
circumstance that might require intervention by pertinent public
authorities.”[406] The
law requires authorities to register all cases of known missing persons and
disappearances in the database,[407] and
ensure that the database be accessible 24 hours a day, by phone and online, to
appropriate officials.[408]

The database’s
design suffers from several major flaws. For one, it mixes two very different
types of cases—the missing and the disappeared—only the latter of
which involves the criminal act of taking a person against his will and
subsequently concealing information about his fate. While in some cases two
categories may overlap (and some cross-listing may be required if the
categories were separated), in many cases they do not overlap. Therefore,
combining them without clear delineation undermines the efficacy of the
database as an investigative tool, and as a means of identifying patterns that
are key to prevention.

Secondly, the definition of “disappeared” used
by the database is vague and overly broad, and is inconsistent with
international human rights standards. A more accurate definition would define a
“disappearance” as a case in which preliminary evidence suggests
that a person was taken against his or her will, and that the perpetrators have
taken steps to conceal the fate of that person. In the instance that initial
evidence makes it difficult to deduce whether a case meets the definition of a
suspected “disappearance,” a preliminary investigation should be
conducted before classifying the case. Where possible in the database,
suspected “disappearances” should also be distinguished from likely
“enforced disappearances”—the latter being those instances
where signs point to the direct or indirect involvement of state agents.

Thirdly, the collection of DNA from the victim’s
relatives, a crucial tool for identifying remains, is not included in the list
of key data stipulated by the law.

Jaime López Aranda—the head of the division
within the Ministry of the Interior known as the Directorate for the National
System of Public Security (Consejo del Sistema Nacional de Seguridad
Pública), which was tasked with developing the registry of the
disappeared—told Human Rights Watch that the registry set out by the law
“is not a well-designed tool,” largely due to these imprecise and
overly broad categories.[409]
López said that building a unified national registry had been
complicated by the fact that, prior to 2012, federal institutions and states
all had different systems for registering disappearances (assuming they had a
system for registering disappearances at all—many states did not). The
Federal Prosecutor’s Office, the Ministry of Public Security, the
National Human Rights Commission, and the Army each had a “database,”
as did some states, López said. (At the time of writing, many of these
databases still exist.[410]) And
each database has its own definition of who constitutes a disappeared person,
how cases are reported (self-reported versus received by authorities, for
example), and what information is gathered for each case. What’s more,
according to López, much of the information compiled by federal and
state authorities and submitted to the Directorate was incomplete or
unreliable.[411] As a
result, his unit could not simply insert the data provided into a federal
database.[412] The
Federal Prosecutor’s Office, working with the Directorate, was assigned
to go through the data submitted by the states and remove duplicates and
errors, López said.[413]

The consequences of the ambiguous definitions and imprecise
reporting by states were evident in several provisional versions of the
database of the disappeared compiled by the Directorate and the Federal
Prosecutor’s Office, copies of which were obtained by Human Rights Watch.
The database-in-progress was first reported on by the Washington Post on
November 29, 2012,[414] and a
version of it was publicly posted on the Internet on December 20 by a
nongovernmental organization, which had received a copy from a journalist at
the Los Angeles Times.[415]

The most extensive version of the database—the one
made public on the internet—contains 20,851 names, with detailed
information. Human Rights Watch was also provided with a second database, which
includes over 16,250 names. While smaller and older than the database of 21,000
names released on the Internet, the earlier version contains some information
that was redacted from the version that was leaked to the general public. Human
Rights Watch also received a chart—dated November 2012 and produced by
the Directorate—which contains the number of missing persons reported by
each of the 31 states and the Federal District, totaling 25,276 persons.

While these lists and charts were works in progress at the
time they were leaked and thus cannot be evaluated as finished products, they
nevertheless reveal serious methodological problems, inconsistencies, and
informational gaps. For instance—reflecting a major flaw in the
law—all versions of the list we have seen mix together cases in which
available evidence led authorities to believe victims were abducted with cases
in which missing persons appear to have lost contact on their own volition. The
inclusion of the latter cases undermines the utility of the database in
estimating the scale of disappearances—that is, cases where the victim is
deprived of his liberty against his will, and information about his fate
withheld by those responsible—and its effectiveness in aiding the search
for missing persons.

Furthermore, discrepancies in the numbers of cases reported
from individual states raise questions about the comprehensiveness of data
contained in the list. For example, the head of a special prosecutor’s
office in Coahuila charged with investigating disappearances told Human Rights
Watch in April 2012 that 1,835 people had disappeared in the state since
December 2006, according to the records of the state prosecutor’s office.[416]
However, the chart of reported cases from November 2012—the most recent
of any obtained by Human Rights Watch—only includes 212 cases from Coahuila
in which the fate of the victim remains unknown.[417]

In spite of these and other issues with the accuracy and
scope of information contained in the lists, and its provisional nature, the
databases nevertheless reveal some alarming patterns. For example, according to
information contained in the version of the database that includes over 16,250
names, in only approximately 7,500 cases has an investigation been opened.[418]
Given that a prerequisite for inclusion on the database is that a case have been
previously reported to authorities, this suggests that in approximately 8,750
reported cases no investigation has been opened. If true, that would constitute
a serious omission on the part of authorities, who have the obligation to open
an investigation whenever such a case is reported.

In addition, the database of 16,250 cases contains a
category defined as “connection between missing person and any criminal
group”—in other words, whether it is suspected that the victim may
have been tied to organized crime.[419]
Interestingly, in only eight cases out of the more than 16,250 listed is any
information included in this subcategory (and even in those eight cases, it is
an accusation rather than a proven fact). This is particularly relevant because
it seems to show the lack of empirical underpinning for the
assertion—made repeatedly by authorities at all levels—that the
majority of victims of disappearances are criminals.[420]

The databases are also
revealing for what they do not contain, such as evidence that much DNA has been
collected from victims’ relatives. The DNA of a victim’s family
members can be used to test against unidentified human remains—such as
those found in mass graves—to determine whether remains likely correspond
to those of a missing person. Yet in only 32 instances in the database of
nearly 21,000 cases was collection of such DNA information noted. There also
appears to be no standardized collection of information on the location where
the victim was last seen (there is no category heading eliciting such
information) even though this is obviously an important piece of information
for investigations.

The information in the databases is poorly organized, making
it hard to search effectively and compile data. For example, the databases in
several places have multiple entry headings for closely related concepts. In
one category the following entry headings can be found, among many others:
“no information,” “not specified,” “they did not
provide information,” “did not provide,”
“unknown,” and “without specification,” the last of
which is spelled five different ways at different points in the chart.

The national database was not completed by the time
President Peña Nieto took office on December 1, 2012, and it remains
incomplete. Nor has a draft of the reglamento—key regulations for
the law—been submitted to Congress. And no national hotline or website
has been created to allow citizens to access information the government has
collected, as the law mandates. As a result, investigators and families still
must rely on an ad hoc, inefficient system for pursuing the disappeared across
Mexico’s 32 federal entities, which poses an ongoing obstacle to
adequately investigating cases of disappearances and searching for missing
persons.

Enforced Disappearances and Mexico’s
Obligations under International Law

The Crime of Enforced Disappearance

The prohibition on enforced
disappearances is part of customary international law and has roots in both
international human rights law and humanitarian law.[421]
It is codified in the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and
is recognized as part of customary international humanitarian law applicable in
both internal and international conflicts.[422]
There are also multiple human rights instruments that address enforced
disappearances, dating back to the 1978 General Assembly Resolution on
Disappeared Persons and the 1992 Declaration on the Protection of all Persons
from Enforced Disappearance (the Declaration).[423]

The crime of enforced disappearances has a number of
specific and unique features that distinguish it from other international
crimes. Although a discrete crime in and of itself, the act of enforced
disappearance has also long been recognized as simultaneously violating
multiple, non-derogable human rights protections. The 1978 General Assembly
resolution recognizes that enforced disappearances constitute violations of the
right to life, freedom from torture, and freedom from arbitrary arrest and
detention. The Declaration likewise explicitly states that the acts which
comprise enforced disappearance constitute a grave and flagrant violation of
the prohibitions found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention Against
Torture, regarding the right to life, the right to liberty and security of the
person, the right not to be subjected to torture and the right to recognition
as a person before the law.[424]In line with the Declaration, the UN Human Rights Committee deems
an enforced disappearance to constitute a violation of, or great threat to,
many of the rights in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights:
the right to life; to liberty and security; freedom from torture or cruel,
inhuman or degrading treatment; and the right of all detained persons to be
treated with humanity.[425]

An enforced disappearance is also a "continuing
crime"—that is it continues to take place so long as the disappeared
person remains missing, and information about his or her fate or whereabouts
has not been provided.[426]This unique aspect of the crime—unlike
that of torture, rape or extrajudicial killing—means that irrespective of
when the initial act of disappearance took place, until the fate of the
disappeared person is resolved there is an ongoing violation that is to be
treated as such by the criminal justice system. In the words of the
Inter-American Court of Human Rights, "[t]he duty to investigate facts of
this type continues as long as there is uncertainty about the fate of the person
who has disappeared.”[427]

An enforced disappearance also has multiple victims beyond
the disappeared person or persons. Victims of an enforced disappearance can
include a number of individuals close to the disappeared person who suffer
direct harm as a result of the crime. Apart from the immediate loss of a loved
one, family and those close to a disappeared person suffer levels of severe
anguish from not knowing the fate of the disappeared person, which amount to
inhuman and degrading treatment. They may also be further treated in an inhuman
and degrading manner by the authorities who fail to investigate or provide
information on the whereabouts and fate of the disappeared person. In addition,
they may suffer direct material loss in the form of loss of income or loss of
social services.

These aspects render disappearances a particularly
pernicious form of violation, and highlight the seriousness with which states
need to take their obligations to prevent and remedy the crime of enforced
disappearance.

The two main treaties that exclusively address states’
obligations in relation to enforced disappearances are the Inter-American
Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons (Inter-American Convention) and
the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced
Disappearance (the International Convention on Disappearances), which came into
force in 2010. Mexico is a party to both treaties.[428]

Definition of
“Disappearances”

The International Convention on Disappearances defines a
disappearance as “the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of
deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of
persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State,
followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by
concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place
such a person outside the protection of the law.”[429]Each state party is required to ensure that
enforced disappearance constitutes an offence under its criminal law, and the
criminal responsibility of at least “any person who commits,
orders, solicits or induces the commission of, attempts to commit, is an
accomplice to or participates in an enforced disappearance” and a
superior who:

i.Knew, or consciously disregarded
information which clearly indicated, that subordinates under his or her
effective authority and control were committing or about to commit a crime of
enforced disappearance;

ii.
Exercised effective
responsibility for and control over activities which were concerned with the
crime of enforced disappearance; and

iii.Failed to take all necessary and
reasonable measures within his or her power to prevent or repress the
commission of an enforced disappearance or to submit the matter to the
competent authorities for investigation and prosecution.[430]

For the purposes of the Inter-American Convention, a
“forced disappearance” is considered to be the act of depriving a
person or persons of his or their freedom, in whatever way, perpetrated by
agents of the state or by persons or groups of persons acting with the
authorization, support, or acquiescence of the state, followed by an absence of
information or a refusal to acknowledge that deprivation of freedom or to give
information on the whereabouts of that person….” The state should
ensure that enforced disappearances are an offence that attracts an
“appropriate punishment commensurate with its extreme gravity.”[431]

Mexico’s domestic legislation—at federal and
state levels—falls short of meeting these standards. (See forthcoming
section on “Inadequate Domestic Legislation to Prevent and Punish
Enforced Disappearances.”)

Obligations to Investigate

The obligation to investigate, prosecute, punish, and remedy
violations of human rights is binding upon all states who are party to human
rights treaties, on the grounds that the effective protection and prevention of
human rights violations requires investigation and punishment of violations
that occur.[432] In
relation to enforced disappearances, the UN Human Rights Committee has made
clear that a state has an obligation to provide an effective remedy,
“including a thorough and effective investigation into the disappearance
and fate” of the disappeared, “adequate information resulting from
its investigation,” and “adequate compensation...for the violations
suffered.”[433]
The Committee also deemed the state “duty-bound...to prosecute, try and
punish those held responsible for such violations” and “to take
measures to prevent similar violations in the future.”[434]
The International Convention on Disappearances codifies the obligation of
states to ensure that, whenever an offense occurs, there is effective
investigation and prosecution and a proper remedy for the victim.[435]
Article 12 also explicitly places an obligation on the state to ensure the
right of individuals to report the fact of enforced disappearance to the
competent authorities. The right to complain about cases of enforced
disappearance is integrally connected to the obligation to conduct a criminal
investigation of enforced disappearances, and states are required to take appropriate
steps to ensure that “the complainant, witnesses, relatives of the
disappeared person and their defence counsel, as well as persons participating
in the investigation, are protected against all ill-treatment or intimidation
as a consequence of the complaint or any evidence given.”[436]

Significantly, Article 3 requires states to take appropriate
measures to investigate acts of enforced disappearances committed by persons or
groups acting without the authorization, support or acquiescence of the
state, and to bring those responsible to justice. This is a position under
international law endorsed by the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary
Disappearances.[437]

Reparations for Victims

The International Convention on Disappearances codifies and
articulates the right of each victim to know “the truth regarding the
circumstances of the enforced disappearance, the progress and results of the
investigation and the fate of the disappeared person.”[438] This
includes measures “to search for, locate and release disappeared persons
and, in the event of death, to locate, respect and return their remains.”[439]
The International Convention on Disappearances also provides that that state
shall ensure victims have the right “to obtain reparation and prompt,
fair and adequate compensation.” The right to obtain reparation covers
material and moral damages and, where appropriate, other forms of reparation
such as restitution, rehabilitation, satisfaction (including restoration of
dignity and reputation), and guarantees of non-repetition.[440]It also requires that states take the
appropriate steps with regard to resolving the legal situation of disappeared
persons whose fate has not been clarified, as well as that of their relatives,
in fields such as social welfare, financial matters, family law, and property
rights.[441]

One of the key obligations in both conventions to which
Mexico is a party is that it bring its domestic legislation into line with its
international commitments by ensuring that enforced disappearances are a crime
under its criminal laws.[442]However, Mexico has not properly transposed
the definition of “enforced disappearance” into its domestic law.
Instead, the various laws—at federal and state levels—contain
overly narrow and conflicting definitions which limit efforts to prevent,
investigate, and prosecute the crime.

According to Mexico’s federal criminal code, “A
public servant who—regardless of whether (s)he has participated in the
legal or illegal detention of an individual or various individuals—helps
to secure their secret detention or deliberately conceals information about it,
commits the offence of an enforced disappearance.”[443]This article therefore only imposes criminal
responsibility for enforced disappearances on “public servants” who
participate in or are aware of detentions. This article does not, however,
impose criminal responsibility on a perpetrator when the enforced disappearance
is “committed by organized groups or private individuals acting on behalf
of, or with the support, direct or indirect, consent or acquiescence” of
the state—a deficiency noted by the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary
Disappearances.[444]
Consequently, acting on Mexico’s federal definition, prosecutors could
claim they have no authority to investigate or prosecute a whole subset of
potential enforced disappearance cases recognized under international law.
Since taking office, President Peña Nieto has repeatedly pledged to
bring the definition of enforced disappearance in Mexico’s federal law
into full compliance with international standards.[445]

At the state level, absent or inadequate legislation
undercuts authorities’ capacity to effectively prosecute those
responsible for the crime, determine the fate of victims, and provide a strong
deterrent for such crimes. Seventeen of Mexico’s 32 federal entities have
not incorporated the crime of enforced disappearances as an offense in their
criminal codes. In these states, according to the UN Working Group on Enforced
Disappearances: “[e]nforced disappearances are treated like abuse of
authority, unlawful aggravated deprivation of liberty, abuse of public
authority, offence against justice, unlawful detention, abduction or a
combination of these offences. However, either such offences do not have the
necessary scope to encompass enforced disappearances or the severity of the
penalty is inappropriate.”[446]

Meanwhile, the 15 states that do
include enforced disappearances as a criminal offence in their laws do not use
the same definition, or the same definition as the federal law, and most of the
state laws are inconsistent with international human rights standards. For
example, several state laws on enforced disappearance do not specify how
statutes of limitations should apply to the crime, if at all. Because an
enforced disappearance is continuous so long as the fate of the victim remains
unknown, the clock on the statute of limitations cannot commence unless and
until the fate of the victim is resolved. And in the case that a statute of
limitations does commence at that stage, the time period must be of a length
and duration proportionate to the extreme seriousness of the offence. This is
the position taken by the International Convention, the Inter-American
Convention, and Mexico’s Supreme Court in a 2004 decision.[447]Many more states fail to provide in law that
an enforced disappearance also occurs when non-state actors carry out the
offence, with the indirect support, authorization, or acquiescence of state
actors. In other instances the UN Working Group had admonished that “[p]enalties
vary according to the jurisdiction, and are not necessarily proportionate to
the seriousness of the offence when compared with that of other offences such
as abduction.”[448]

Furthermore, Mexico’s Military Code of Justice does
not criminalize enforced disappearances. Because cases of alleged
disappearances perpetrated by the military in Mexico are virtually always
investigated in the military justice system, this absence results in a serious
gap in relevant legislation.[449]

Misuse of the Military Justice System to Prosecute
Enforced Disappearances

Human Rights Watch conducted extensive research
prior to Mexico’s Disappeared that documented serious abuses
committed by the members of the military against civilians—including two
reports,Neither
Rights Nor Security[450](November 2011) andUniform
Impunity[451] (July
2009). One of the main reasons military abuses persist, these reports and
subsequent research found, is because soldiers who commit them are virtually
never held accountable for their crimes. And one of the main reasons they are
not held accountable is because they continue to be investigated and prosecuted
in the military justice system, which lacks the independence and impartiality
to judge fellow members of the military and has failed in its obligation to
provide victims with an effective judicial remedy.

The Mexican Constitution allows for the use of
military jurisdiction only in the case of “crimes and faults against
military discipline.”[452] It
also states, “under no cause and for no circumstance may military courts
extend their jurisdiction over persons who are not members of the Armed Forces.
When a crime or a fault to military law involves a civilian, the case shall be
brought before the competent civil authority.”[453]
This provision makes sense and is consistent with international law, but only
so long as breaches of military discipline are not defined so broadly that they
include serious criminal acts against civilians, such as enforced
disappearances. However, the Mexican military claims the right to investigate
and prosecute enforced disappearances, torture, killings, and other serious
human rights violations committed by the military against civilians, relying on
a provision of the Code of Military Justice—Article 57—which
establishes a very expansive notion of such offenses that includes
“faults under common or federal law…when committed by military
personnel in active service or in connection with acts of service.”[454]Federal and state prosecutors in the
civilian justice system are complicit in this overly broad interpretation by
deferring cases of human rights violations involving members of the Armed
Forces to the military justice system, under the rationale that they may result
from a breach of military discipline.

The military justice system in Mexico has serious structural flaws that
undermine its independence and impartiality.[455] Mexico’s secretary of
defense wields both executive and judicial power over the Armed Forces.
Military judges have little job security and may reasonably fear that the
secretary could remove them or otherwise sideline their careers for issuing
decisions that he dislikes. Civilian review of military court decisions is very
limited. There is virtually no public scrutiny of, or access to information
about, what actually happens during military investigations, prosecutions, and
trials, which can take years.

These structural flaws are borne out in practice.
The Mexican Ministry of Defense (Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional,
SEDENA) limits excessively and without reasonable justification the
public’s access to basic information on the status of Army abuse cases
still pending before the military justice system, making it extremely difficult
to know with certainty to what extent members of the armed forces are, in fact,
being held accountable. In many cases, witnesses and victims are reluctant to
testify or participate, afraid of the future consequences of speaking about
military abuses in front of military officials.

The limited information
available demonstrates that the likelihood of obtaining justice in cases of
alleged human rights violations in the military justice system is extremely
slim. The Military Prosecutor’s Office
opened nearly 5,000 investigations into human rights violations by soldiers
against civilians from January 2007 to April 2012, according to information
obtained through public information requests submitted by Human Rights Watch.[456] The Mexican military found only
38 military personnel guilty of criminal offences since December 2006,
according to SEDENA.[457] It is not clear in records
provided by the Armed Forces how many of those convicted were
fugitives tried and found guilty in absentia, or if any were later exonerated
following appeals. In addition, 11 of the military personnel counted among
those convicted were convicted of crimes committed before 2007.

Both international courts and Mexico’s Supreme Court
have recognized the gravity of this problem, and called on Mexico to reform its
military justice system. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has issued
decisions in four cases since 2009 mandating that the military justice system
should not be used to investigate or prosecute human rights violations alleged
to have been committed by the military and calling on Mexico to revise article
57 of the Code of Military Justice accordingly.[458]
In July 2011, in a case derived from the Inter-American Court’s judgment
in the enforced disappearance case of Radilla Pacheco v. Mexico,
Mexico’s Supreme Court determined that the decisions of the
Inter-American Court are binding, and should be taken into consideration in
rulings by Mexican judges.[459]
(In the Radilla case, the Inter-American Court judgment stated,
"Regarding situations that violate the human rights of civilians, military
jurisdiction cannot operate under any circumstance."[460])

However, according to Mexico’s legal system, the July
2011 determination of the Supreme Court did not set legally binding precedent
for future cases involving alleged military abuse. To set legal precedent for
future cases, the Supreme Court either needs to reach a similar ruling in five
consecutive cases or issue an interpretation of a law that has been interpreted
differently by lower level courts.

In August 2012, Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled
in the Bonfilio Villegas case that military jurisdiction could not be
used to investigate and prosecute the killing of a civilian by members of the
military. Villegas was shot and killed by members of the Army in Guerrero in
2009 when the bus he was riding in drove away from a military checkpoint.[461]
The Supreme Court ruled that his killing should be prosecuted in the civilian
justice system, and that the use of article 57 of the Code of Military Justice
in the case—which is used by military prosecutors to claim jurisdiction
over such cases—was unconstitutional.[462]
However, this ruling by itself does not establish binding jurisprudence.

Moreover, even if Mexico’s Supreme Court were to
establish binding jurisprudence that unequivocally excludes all human rights
violations from military jurisdiction, military prosecutors could still open
investigations into cases of alleged military abuses, ignoring victim’s
rights. Changing this practice requires a reform to Mexico’s Code of
Military Justice specifying that no human rights violations fall within the
scope of military jurisdiction.

In April 2012, the Mexican Senate’s Justice Commission
approved draft legislation that would have required all cases of alleged human
rights violations to be transferred to the civilian justice system. However,
under pressure from ranking officers in the Army and Navy, party leaders in the
Mexican Senate blocked the bill from coming to a vote prior to the end of the
relevant legislative period.[463] As a
result, the general practice remains unchanged, as do the results: with the
full complicity of the civilian Federal Prosecutor’s Office, cases of
human rights violations—including enforced disappearances—continue
to be sent to the military justice system, where they go unpunished.

Downgrading the Crime of Enforced Disappearance and
Lenient Sentences by Military Prosecutors and Judges

Evidence of the bias and incompetence of military
prosecutors and judges in investigating and prosecuting cases of human rights
violations can be found in their handling of cases of enforced disappearances.
According to information provided by the military, from December 1, 2006 to
September 19, 2012, not a single member of the military was convicted in
military courts for the crime of enforced disappearance.[464]
During the same period, Human Rights Watch documented more than 40 cases in
which evidence suggested the participation of members of the Army and Navy in
enforced disappearances.

Human Rights Watch found strong evidence in
several cases that military prosecutors had charged members of the military
alleged to have committed enforced disappearances for lesser crimes. In
addition, in at least three cases with facts suggesting enforced disappearance
crimes by Armed Forces personnel, records provided by the military show that
military judges convicted the accused personnel of lesser crimes.

In response to a request filed by Human Rights
Watch for records of cases in which members of the military had been convicted
by military courts for human rights violations committed against civilians from
December 1, 2006 to the present, the military provided a list containing
information about two cases in which members of the Armed Forces were convicted
for committing crimes consistent with enforced disappearances.[465]

In 2009, a lieutenant colonel (teniente coronel)
was convicted in military court for “secretly burying a body and
violating the federal law to prevent and punish torture.”[466]
The charge suggests the lieutenant colonel tortured a civilian—possibly
to death—and then buried the victim’s body to conceal his crime.
For these crimes, the lieutenant colonel was given a sentence of two years in
prison.

In 2010, seven soldiers were found guilty by a
military court of a similar crime: three corporals (cabos) were convicted
of “violence against persons causing homicide” and “covering
up the crime in the first degree”; and four soldiers (soldados)
were convicted of “violence against persons causing homicide and secretly
burying bodies.”[467] The charges
suggest the accused killed the victims and then buried their bodies to hide
what they had done. The military provided conflicting accounts of the sentence
given to the members of the military in this case. According to one official
document, the three corporals were sentenced to “one year, one day, and
60 days of fines,” whereas the four soldiers were sentenced to “six
months, two days, and 45 days of fines.”[468]
Yet another official document issued by the military said all seven members of
the military had been sentenced with “1 year in prison or a fine of sixty
days.”[469] It is
unclear why the documents, both issued by the military, provide different
sentences.[470]

Both of the cases involve crimes that are
consistent with the definition of an enforced disappearance: state actors
deprived persons of their liberty and took steps to conceal their fate. Yet
none of the members of the military who were found guilty of these crimes were
investigated or prosecuted for enforced disappearances. The crime with which
several of them were charged—“secretly burying a body” (inhumación
clandestina)—does not appear in the Code of Military Justice. These
actions raise serious doubts about the independence and impartiality of the
prosecutors who investigated and charged the members of the military, as well
as the judges who sentenced them.

The military’s downgrading of the crime of
enforced disappearance is further evidenced by several cases documented by
Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission. For example, on November 14,
2008, Army soldiers entered the home of brothers José Luis and Carlos
Guzmán Zúñiga in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, and
arbitrarily detained them. The brothers have not been seen since. After
conducting an in-depth investigation into the crime, the National Human Rights
Commission concluded that "the diverse evidence gathered in the case
documents make it possible to prove that the arrest and subsequent
disappearance of José Luis and Carlos Guzmán Zúñiga
is attributable to Army officials.”[471]However, according to SEDENA, military
prosecutors are investigating the case as a crime of “abuse of
authority,” which the military defines as “a soldier who treats an
inferior in a way that violates legal norms.”[472]More than four years after military
prosecutors opened an investigation into the case (on January 14, 2009), no
soldiers have been charged, according to SEDENA.[473]

In another enforced disappearance case involving
the military, on June 20, 2009, a man went to visit the home of his friend in
Los Reyes, Michoacán. Shortly after he arrived, between 5 and 6 p.m.,
Army soldiers entered the home without a search warrant, saying they had
questions about a car parked outside, questioned both civilians, and then
detained the man.[474]
Following the detention, Army authorities from the 37th Infantry
Battalion (37/o Batallón de Infantería) denied having detained
the man. His body was discovered on July 8, 2009, in Peribán de Ramos,
Michoacán. Upon investigating the case, the National Human Rights
Commission concluded that “officers from the Army who participated in the
events of June 20, 2009, are responsible for the [man’s] enforced
disappearance…that is, the deprivation of freedom by the intervention of
state officials and the lack of information regarding the detention or location
of the individual.”[475]

Nevertheless, according to SEDENA, military
prosecutors investigated the case as a crime of “violence resulting in
homicide” and “providing false information in statements,”
and not as an enforced disappearance. Five members of the military were charged
for the crime in military jurisdiction, two of whom—a sergeant and a
corporal—were convicted on January 23, 2012, military records show.[476]
While it is unclear from SEDENA’s records the charges on which the two
men were ultimately convicted, one of them was granted conditional liberty (libertad
bajo caución) on March 17, 2012—after serving less than two
months in prison.[477]The granting of conditional liberty in this
case appears to run contrary to Mexico’s Code of Military Justice, which
prescribes that conditional liberty cannot be granted for many grave crimes (delitos
graves),[478]such as the mistreatment of detainees
resulting in death.[479]

International law specifies that states should
prosecute and punish perpetrators of serious human rights violations with
penalties commensurate with the gravity of the offense. The Rome Statute of the
International Criminal Court states, “In determining the sentence, the
Court shall…take into account such factors as the gravity of the crime
and the individual circumstances of the convicted persons.”[480]Furthermore, case law from the International
Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda (ICTR) and the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) supports
the notion that the penalty should reflect the gravity of the crimes. For
example, an ICTR trial chamber indicated that “the penalty must first and
foremost be commensurate to the gravity of the offence,” and that
“the more heinous the crime, the higher the sentences that should be
imposed.”[481] In
addition, the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from
Enforced Disappearance states that: “Each State Party shall make the
offence of enforced disappearance punishable by appropriate penalties which
take into account its extreme seriousness.”[482]
Mexico’s federal criminal code, for example, prescribes a sentence
between 5 and 40 years in prison for the crime of enforced disappearance.[483]
The leniency of sentences imposed in military courts for crimes consistent with
enforced disappearances in the aforementioned cases suggests that even in the
very rare cases where such crimes are prosecuted, the punishment is inadequate.

Human Rights Watch is profoundly grateful to the families of
the disappeared who shared their testimonies with us. As this report
demonstrates, disappearances inflict deep and lasting suffering on people whose
loved ones have been taken—suffering that is exacerbated by the fact that
the fate of the victims remains unknown. Recounting such stories is often
extremely painful and requires individuals to overcome a well-founded fear of
reprisals. Families often journeyed great distances to meet with our
researchers, in some cases traveling along the same roads where their loved
ones were abducted. It was with great courage that these families spoke to us. Many
of them expressed the hope that, by telling their stories, others would be
spared the abuses and pain they had suffered.

Many Mexican organizations and individuals collaborated in
the research for this report, and we are deeply indebted to them for their
contributions. These partners played a critical role in providing expert
guidance and advice, as well as assisting with the documentation of both
individual cases and broader patterns of abuse. The organizations and
individuals include, but are not limited to, the following:

In Guerrero: the Tlachinollan Center for Human
Rights in the Montaña (Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Montaña
Tlachinollan); the Guerrero Coalition of Civilian Human Rights Organizations
(Red Guerrerense de Organismos Civiles de Derechos Humanos); and the Workshop
of Community Development (Taller de Desarrollo Comunitario, TADECO).

In Nuevo León: Citizens in Support of
Human Rights (Ciudadanos en Apoyo de los Derechos Humanos, CADHAC), and
Sanjuana Martínez.

In Tamaulipas, the Nuevo Laredo Committee of
Human Rights (Comité de Derechos Humanos de Nuevo Laredo).

Human Rights Watch appreciates the willingness of the
National Human Rights Commission to provide information for this report
(particularly statistics related to disappearances). The UN Office of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights in Mexico provided expert analysis on the efforts
of the federal and state governments to criminalize enforced disappearances.

Finally, Human Rights Watch would like to thank the
government officials who agreed to be interviewed, particularly the state
authorities and prosecutor’s offices in Coahuila and Nuevo León
for their openness and cooperation, as well as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
for its assistance in setting up several meetings with government officials.

Annex 1: Cases of
Disappearances Documented by Human Rights Watch

Methodology for List of Disappearances

The names included in this list are cases in which Human Rights Watch
found sufficient evidence to conclude that the individuals were victims of
“disappearances.” Cases in which we collected compelling evidence
that the disappearance was carried out with the direct or indirect
participation of state agents are marked as “enforced
disappearances” (for more on the distinction between disappearances and
enforced disappearances, see previous section, “Definition of
“Disappearances”).

The cases on this list were documented by Human Rights Watch
in fact-finding missions from 2009 to the end of 2012. All of the
disappearances included were committed during the administration of former
president Felipe Calderón, who held office from December 2006 to
December 2012.

The victims do not represent all of the disappearances
carried out in the states where Human Rights Watch conducted research, nor do
they purport to offer a representative sample of the full range of cases of
disappearances. Human Rights Watch often learned about these cases because
family members of the disappeared person sought the help of local human rights
organizations or authorities, through other affected families, or through press
accounts. We then sought out the relatives of the disappeared persons, and,
when possible, met with them.

Therefore, any disappearance case that was not reported to
local organizations, authorities, or the media, or was not known to other
families of the disappeared, would likely have been missed in our sample,
indicating a selection bias. In addition, there is a selection bias involved
with the types of disappearance cases that are reported. There are many
factors—such as fear of repercussions or lack of awareness of how to
report a disappearance—which could make relatives of a disappeared person
more or less likely to report the crime. It is impossible to determine whether
the disappearances documented in this report share common characteristics that
differentiate them from other disappearance cases which our sample did not
identify.

In several instances, the names and other identifying
information of the victims have been withheld, out of concern for their safety
and that of their families. In some of these cases, victims’ relatives
requested this information be withheld; in others, based on our assessment of
potential risk to victims and their relatives, Human Rights Watch decided to
withhold certain information.

The cases of disappearances have been organized
alphabetically by the last name of the victim. Cases for which names have been
withheld have been randomly integrated into the list.

Annex 2: Letter from Human
Rights Watch to
Alejandro Poiré Romero, Former Secretary of the Interior,
March 1, 2012

On March 1, 2012, Americas director José Miguel
Vivanco delivered the following letter to Mexico’s then-secretary of the
interior, Alejandro Poiré Romero, at a meeting between Human Rights
Watch and the Ministry of the Interior.

The letter responds to one sent to Human Rights Watch by Secretary
Poiré on January 10, 2012, in which the secretary challenged the main
findings of Human Rights Watch’s November 2011 report, Neither Rights
Nor Security.

Washington D.C., March 1,
2012

Dr. Alejandro Poiré
Romero

Secretary
of the Interior

Mexico City

Mexico

Dear
Secretary Poiré,

I am writing in response to your
January 10, 2012 letter concerning our report, “Neither Rights Nor
Security: Killings, Torture, and Disappearances in Mexico’s ‘War on
Drugs,’”[484] which we
released in Mexico City on November 9, 2011.

Due to the seriousness of the
issues addressed in our report, we would very much like to take at face value
the assurances in your letter that the Mexican government is committed to
engaging in a constructive dialogue regarding the issues addressed in the
report. Indeed, when we met with President Felipe Calderón in November,
we had a very candid and constructive exchange regarding our findings, and we
were encouraged by the fact that the president appeared to understand his
obligation to address the serious problems we had documented.

We were,
therefore, perplexed and disappointed to receive your letter, which—rather
than advancing this dialogue—attempts instead to dismiss our conclusions
by claiming they are based on “multiple imprecisions and unsubstantiated
assertions.”[485] Since
that time, you have on several occasions publicly cast doubt on our findings,
alleging that the report contains “methodological flaws,”
“errors,” and “imprecise information,”[486] and makes
“categorical and generalized assertions…that do not reflect the
real situation in Mexico”[487]—and
claiming that these allegations are proved in your letter.

Human Rights Watch fully welcomes
criticisms of our reporting that can help to strengthen our understanding of
human rights problems and increase our effectiveness as advocates for the
policies needed to make progress in Mexico. We also take very seriously our
responsibility to evaluate any shortcomings or inaccuracies that we may have
committed in producing our report.

Yet, after a careful review of
your letter, we have found that none of the criticisms you make of our report
stand up to rigorous scrutiny. And we are concerned that your public statements
claiming that your letter disproves our findings serve to misinform the public
and undermine efforts to remedy these problems. Indeed, viewed in the context
of the scope of the abuses and impunity we documented, the substance and tone
of your letter—and your public comments—could well be construed as
evidence that the Calderón administration is not taking seriously its
legal obligation to investigate and punish these reprehensible human rights
violations.

Widespread and Systematic Abuses

A principal finding of our report
is that Mexican security forces have committed widespread abuses in the context
of counternarcotics operations, including the systematic use of torture in five
states. Your letter seeks to dismiss this finding by claiming that the abuses
documented in our report “represent a true exception.”[488] We
disagree. Our report documents more than 230 cases in which Mexican security
forces are implicated in grave abuses—including cases from five different
states, and cases involving every type of security force involved in
counternarcotics operations (the Army, Navy, and the federal, state, and local
police).

As proof that these cases are a
“true exception,” you observe that only 90 of the 5,814 complaints
received by the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) against the Army
between 2007 and 2011 resulted in recommendations, as if to suggest that the
remaining complaints were judged without merit.[489] This
argument is based on a false premise: the fact that a complaint does not end in
a recommendation does not necessarily mean that there was no human rights
violation. In fact, could also mean that the CNDH resolved the complaint
through another mechanism, that it is still investigating the allegations, or
that it failed to adequately investigate them, as our report shows happened in
many cases.

Your letter also objects to our
claim that torture is a “systematic” problem in the five states
where we conducted our research. Having found evidence that torture occurs in
all of the states we examined, using the same specific methods (electric
shocks, waterboarding, and asphyxiation), under similar circumstances (when the
victim has been detained allegedly “in flagrante” or without
detention orders), in the same types of venues (military bases and police
stations), and for the same purpose (to coerce confessions or obtain
information), we believe there is evidence that the practice is systematic.

Your letter also criticizes the
report for attempting “to generalize about the entire Nation”[490] based on
research in only five states. Yet the report does not purport to comment on the
“entire” country. Rather, it addresses abuses in the context of
President Calderón’s “war on drugs” (which has
affected some regions of the country significantly more than others), based on
findings from five of the states where federal security forces have undertaken
some of their largest interventions, and which account for 43 percent of
drug-related violence in the country (according to the most recent available
official statistics).[491] These
five states—Baja California, Chihuahua, Guerrero, Nuevo León, and
Tabasco—are located in different regions of the country, governed by
different political parties, and account for roughly one-third of the federal
government’s large-scale counternarcotics operations. Even if it were
somehow possible that the abuses we document were occurring only in
these states and in none their neighbors, this would still constitute a
problem of national proportions.

Another major claim in your letter
is that “…the report adds up cases with minimal evidence and
without any details, as a result of which it is not possible to identify the
victims, [or] determine the source of the alleged violations.”[492] This is a
curious and baseless complaint given that the report itself identifies the
victims and specific state entities implicated in the vast majority of cases.[493] Moreover,
contrary to your claim, the report does provide detailed descriptions of
the cases based on extensive evidence culled from multiple
sources—ranging from medical examinations, crime scene photographs, and
witness testimony, to judicial rulings, written and oral communications by
officials, and videos of court proceedings, among others.

You also “lament” that
“neither the federal government nor any Mexican authority was even
informed of the accusations against them, to say nothing of being given the
opportunity to provide their version of the facts.”[494] In fact,
during our two-year investigation, we consistently sought meetings with the
relevant authorities in order to obtain their versions of events. Representatives
of Human Rights Watch met with officials from the Federal Police, Federal
Prosecutor’s Office, Defense Ministry, Ministry of the Interior, Foreign
Ministry, and the Federal Judiciary—as well as state and municipal
officials including mayors, attorneys general, police chiefs, and state human
rights ombudsmen’s offices—to discuss the individual cases, as well
as the broader patterns of abuse and impunity that we documented. All of these
authorities are duly cited throughout our report.

Where official accounts may be
lacking, it is due primarily to the fact that some authorities either refused
to respond to our queries, or provided incomplete or patently inaccurate
information when they did. For example, when I wrote you in your capacity as
national security spokesman requesting information regarding federal investigations
of homicide cases, you declined to provide the information, wrongly claiming
that it was “strictly classified.”[495] When I
pointed out that, in our opinion, the information was not classified under the
law and resubmitted the request, unfortunately your office never responded.[496]

Impunity for Abuses

Another principal finding of our
report is that virtually none of the soldiers and police responsible for the
abuses we document has been held accountable, in large part due to systematic
flaws in investigations. Your letter characterizes this finding as “one
of the most reckless assertions”[497] of the
report, and seeks to dismiss it by claiming that federal officials do
investigate all human rights cases brought to their attention. What you do not
address, however, is our actual concern, which is not the quantity of
investigations but rather their quality.

Our report provides scores of
detailed examples of egregious and systematic lapses by authorities
investigating human rights cases. These shortcomings include, among others, the
failure to conduct ballistics tests or collect evidence at the crime scene
after alleged killings by security forces, the failure to perform legally-required
medical examinations of torture victims, and negligence in responding in a
timely fashion to reports of “disappeared” people.

The report also provides official
data demonstrating that investigations of human rights cases rarely lead to convictions.
For example, of 3,671 investigations opened from January 2007 through July 2011
in the military justice system into alleged human rights abuses committed by
soldiers,[498] only 29
soldiers have been convicted of crimes.[499] Only two
officials were convicted of torture by federal courts between 1994 and June
2010 (the most recent date for which such information is available).[500] Moreover,
the report refers to the findings of well-respected intergovernmental bodies
that have reached similar conclusions—such as the UN Working Group on
Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. Last year, this group concluded that,
“[i]mpunity is a chronic and present pattern in cases of enforced
disappearances and no sufficient efforts are being carried out neither to determine
the fate or whereabouts of persons who disappeared, to punish those responsible
nor to provide reparations.”[501]

Regarding your discussion of the quantity
of human rights investigations at the federal level, it is worth noting that
the statistics you provide in your letter actually refer to the overall number
of federal investigations into all crimes, and not necessarily
investigations into cases of alleged human rights abuses.[502]
Similarly, the only three cases you offer as evidence of the authorities’
commitment to hold accountable those responsible for abuses are not
actually cases of human rights abuses, but rather ordinary crimes by non-state
actors.[503] And,
indeed, the only one of them which has resulted in convictions—involving
the students murdered in Villas de Salvárcar[504]—is
a textbook example of the sort of abuse and impunity that we document in our
report. At least one of the suspects in this case was tortured into confessing
to the crime, according to our research, as well as the findings of the National
Human Rights Commission.[505]
What’s more, when this suspect sought to recant at trial—explaining
that he had confessed only after being subject to beatings, asphyxiation,
electric shocks, and death threats—the judge dismissed his plea and chose
instead to admit his initial confession as valid.[506]

The fact that you would attempt to
use the Villas de Salvárcar case to dismiss concerns about the problems
of abuse and impunity in Mexico suggests that your office has not paid serious
attention either to the content of our report or the findings of the National
Human Rights Commission.

A Flawed “War on
Drugs”

The main conclusion of our report
is that President Calderón’s “war on drugs”—by
not addressing the problems of abuse and impunity—has exacerbated a
climate of violence, insecurity, and fear in many parts of the country.

Your letter seeks to dismiss this
conclusion, in part, by criticizing our use of the term “war on
drugs,” calling it “an imprecision which gives rise to many
others.”[507] We fully
agree that “war” is an inaccurate term for describing
Mexico’s current security crisis. And contrary to what you allege in your
letter, we never claim or suggest that an actual war (as defined by
international norms) is taking place in Mexico today.

The reason we employ the term,
always in quotes, is because it is one that is commonly used within Mexico,
including by the highest government officials, to refer to the Calderón administration’s
counternarcotics efforts. Indeed, on more than 50 occasions President
Calderón himself has directly referred to his public security strategy
as a “war” on drug traffickers or organized crime, most of which
can be easily accessed on the official website of the office of the president.[508] It is odd
that you would object so strenuously to our using the label that President
Calderón himself has used frequently over the course of his term to
describe his counternarcotics policy.

You also seek to dismiss our
critical assessment of President Calderón’s public security
strategy by attributing to us the absurd view, “that [Mexico] should not
have started to fight organized crime without first reforming its
institutions.”[509] Our
report says nothing of the kind. We have never argued that Mexico had to choose
between confronting cartels and strengthening its flawed institutions. On the
contrary, we have argued that in order to address the very serious threat posed
by organized crime, Mexico needed to address the chronic abuses and impunity of
its security forces, as well as support and strengthen justice officials, who
play a critical role in dismantling criminal groups. Unfortunately, it is
precisely in such efforts to bolster institutions and implement reforms that
the government of President Calderón has fallen short.

Moving Forward

Fortunately there is one crucial
area of the report where we do apparently share common ground: our
recommendations for addressing human rights problems related to Mexico’s
public security policy. Your letter acknowledges that “the great majority
of [the recommendations] are in the right direction,” and that “the
president has ordered that many of them are put into effect immediately.”[510] Indeed,
we were pleased when President Calderón announced last December[511]—and
reiterated in his February speech to the CNDH[512]—that
he was taking several steps to curb abusive practices, including: ordering
security forces to immediately transfer detainees, including those detained in
flagrante, to civilian prosecutors; instructing security forces to make
public and, where necessary, establish laws on use of force, detention
protocol, and preservation of evidence; and developing an inter-governmental
federal database for the “disappeared.”

Similarly, we are encouraged by
the recent public statements of Secretary of Defense Guillermo Galván
Galván, who acknowledged that the Armed Forces have committed
“mistakes” in their efforts, and that recognizing those mistakes—as
well as holding accountable those who have committed them—is a show of
loyalty to the institution.[513] And we
welcome the General’s statement that “the institutions of the
military justice system…have issued pronouncements” in favor of
transferring cases involving human rights abuses to the civilian justice
system, which is a critical step towards reducing impunity for military abuses.[514]

However, these reform efforts are
falling short in critical areas, and these important statements have not yet resulted
in changes in practice. Arguably the most glaring example of the former is the
Calderón government’s ongoing failure to reform the military
justice system. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (in four recent
rulings) and Mexico’s Supreme Court have both issued judgments stating
that all cases of human rights violations allegedly committed by the military
should be investigated and prosecuted in the civilian justice system, because
the military justice system’s proven lack of impartiality and independence
in judging these cases. However, rather than comply with the rulings of the
Inter-American Court, in October 2010 the president presented an initiative
that would only exclude three kinds of violations from military jurisdiction,
and would give considerable discretion to military officials in classifying
complaints, despite their track record of downgrading serious abuses to lesser
offenses (crimes of the very sort that would remain in military jurisdiction
under President Calderón’s proposal).[515]

At the same time, the
Calderón administration and military authorities continue to speak and
act in ways that undermine their commitments to strengthen human rights and the
rule of law. For example, President Calderón pledges to put human rights
at the center of his security strategy, but at the same time compares suspected
criminals to “cockroaches” that must be “cleaned up.”[516]
Similarly, while the president urges the Armed Forces to hand over jurisdiction
of alleged military abuses to civilian prosecutors, the secretary of defense
spearheads a legal appeal that challenges precisely that principle in a
landmark case: the extrajudicial execution of Bonfilio Rubio Villegas, who was
killed by soldiers in Huamuxtitlán, Guerrero, in 2009.[517] Meanwhile,
only three days after President Calderón issues instructions that,
“the Military Attorney General’s Office insist on declining
military jurisdiction over cases [involving alleged abuses committed by
soldiers],” the military attorney general says that military prosecutors
cannot transfer cases of alleged abuses to civilian prosecutors until the
Military Code of Justice is reformed.[518] Indeed,
that is why we were so troubled by your letter and your recent public
criticisms of our report, which provide yet another example of the
government’s contradictory messages, and call into question your
seriousness in addressing these issues.

Nevertheless, we remain willing to
collaborate with the government in crafting a public security approach that
helps reduce such grave human rights violations and ensures officials who
commit them are held accountable. We believe it is critical that the victims
whose cases we have documented, as well as countless other victims not named in
our report, have a real opportunity for justice. And we believe that a public
security policy that respects fundamental rights is more effective in reducing
violence and restoring public confidence in democratic institutions, gains that
will serve the broader interests of all Mexicans.

In recent months, the government
has demonstrated greater openness in the way it talks about human rights, which
has the power to impact both the practices of officials and the attitudes of
the public. Yet despite these important commitments, much remains to be done.
If, contrary to all evidence, the government continues to downplay the
prevalence of abuses, or claims that it has taken adequate steps to investigate
those that have occurred, it will squander its last opportunity to remedy these
serious problems. On the contrary, if it chooses to translate its recent
rhetorical commitments into actions—reforming its flawed military justice
system or implementing measures directed at reducing the incidence of
disappearances, killings, and torture—it will put Mexico on track for a
change that is crucial. We sincerely hope it will choose the latter option, and
that we can work together in a serious effort to find constructive solutions.

Sincerely,

José
Miguel Vivanco

[1]
UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, General Comment on
Article 4 of the Declaration, E/CN.4/1996/38 (1995).

[2]The amparo is a legal remedy designed to protect the
rights recognized by the Mexican Constitution, as well as international
treaties, when government officials act in violation of these rights. An amparo
can challenge laws, acts, or omissions by the government or state officials
that violate the rights of an individual or group. The purpose of filing an
amparo is to end to the violation of those rights or the unconstitutional
application of a law. In the case of failure to act (omission), the amparo
seeks to compel the government and its representatives to comply with their
legal obligations. An amparo is a federal remedy and must be filed with the
appropriate federal court, even if the responsible party is a local or state
actor.

[3]
Mexico's National Human Rights Commission (Comisión Nacional de los
Derechos Humanos, CNDH) was created in 1990 to monitor the human rights practices
of government institutions and promote increased respect for fundamental rights
in Mexico. Originally created as part of the Ministry of the Interior, the
commission became a fully autonomous agency in 1999 through a constitutional
reform, which granted it complete independence from the executive branch. Each
of Mexico’s 32 federal entities has its own human rights commission. The
commissions’ mandate entails investigating and documenting human rights
abuses, and then employing a variety of instruments to resolve the cases. The
commissions are empowered to receive formal complaints from victims (quejas)
and issue recommendations (recomendaciones) directed at state
agents—a public document that details human rights violations and
identifies steps that government institutions should take to redress them.

[14]
Approximately 70 photographs taken by witnesses outside of Motel Santa Monica
on June 5, 2011, given to Human Rights Watch on June 5, 2012, by Raymundo
Ramos, director of Nuevo Laredo Comité de Derechos Humanos de Nuevo
Laredo. Photographs include shots of vehicles as the convoy departs the motel
showing five white pick-up trucks with Navy insignia on the driver’s side
door and the following official unit numbers: 4259, 101050, 101045, 600159 and
600160 (on file with Human Rights Watch).

[30]
Human Rights Watch interview with Raymundo Ramos, director of Nuevo Laredo
Comité de Derechos Humanos de Nuevo Laredo, and with the families of
four of the victims, Monterrey, Nuevo León, June 5, 2012.

[38]
For the purposes of this report, “local police” refers to state and
municipal police. Each of Mexico’s 32 federal entities (31 states and the
Federal District) has its own police force, as do the vast majority of its
approximately 2,400 municipalities. State prosecutors’ offices also have
their own police force—judicial police, or policías
ministeriales—who are also considered “local police.”

[53]
For the purposes of this report, “federal police” refers to
officials from the Federal Police (Policía Federal) and federal
judicial police. The Policía Federal force was part of the
Ministry of Public Security (Secretaría de Seguridad Pública)
until the ministry was dissolved in January 2013, at which time the police were
placed under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior. Federal judicial
police—ministeriales federales—include those who worked for
the now defunct Federal Investigation Agency (Agencia Federal de Investigacion,
or AFI), which was dissolved in 2009.

[60]
Human Rights Watch interview with relatives of two of the disappeared workers,
Monterrey, Nuevo León, June 3, 2012. The identity of the individuals has
been withheld out of concern for their safety.

[62]
Human Rights Watch interview with relatives of two of the disappeared workers,
Monterrey, Nuevo León, June 3, 2012. The complaint, a copy of which was
provided to Human Rights Watch by one of the relatives, was filed on June 6,
2011, with the Nuevo León State Prosecutor’s Office in San
Nicolás de Garza. The identity of the complainant and the complaint
number have been withheld out of concern for the individual’s safety.

[64]Arraigo allows public prosecutors to hold suspects, with the
authorization of a judge, for up to 80 days before they charging them with a
crime.

[65]
Human Rights Watch email communication with Consuelo Morales, director of human
rights organization Citizens in Support of Human Rights (Ciudadanos en Apoyo a
los Derechos Humanos, CADHAC), who is assisting several of the victims’
families in the case, January 24, 2013.

[66]
Human Rights Watch interview with family members of victims, Monterrey, Nuevo
León, June 2, 2012. The identity of the individuals has been withheld
out of concern for their safety.

[82]
Zacatecas State Prosecutor’s Office, “Prosecutor’s Office
Confirms the Recovery of the Remains of One of the Hunters from
León” (PGJEZ confirma el hallazgo de uno de los cazadores
Leóneses), press release 129, September 27, 2011, http://pgje.zacatecas.gob.mx/sitio/ComunicacionSocial/Boletines/Comunicado129.pdf
(accessed November 2, 2012). The widespread use of torture by authorities in
Mexico to extract forced confessions—as documented in previous reports by
Human Rights Watch such as Neither Rights Nor Security—should be
taken into account when weighing the truthfulness and evidentiary value of
these and other admissions of guilt (see previous chapter on
“Methodology”).

In September 2011, the Zacatecas State
Prosecutor’s Office said it had matched the DNA in a bone fragment
discovered in a barren field in Zacatecas with that of one of the missing
hunters, Ernesto Cordero Anguiano. His family told Human Rights Watch that they
did not accept the veracity of the DNA matching process.

[83]
Human Rights Watch telephone interview with Angeles López, human rights
defender from the organization Centro de Derechos Humanos Victoria Diez,
León, Guanajuato, who is working with the families of the disappeared
hunters, February 15, 2013. According to López, the case file is
02/2011, and the case is before the Sixth Court (El Juzgado Sexto del Ramo
Penal de Zacatecas).

[84]
Human Rights Watch interview with Dania Vega (pseudonym), Torreón,
Coahuila, April 24, 2012. The identity of the individual has been withheld out
of concern for her safety.

[86]
The victims’ family filed a formal complaint before the Coahuila State
Prosecutor’s Office in October 2008, a copy of which is on file with
Human Rights Watch, for the disappearances. While the prosecutor’s office
formally opened an investigation, no progress was made in finding the victims
or those responsible. The date and number of the formal complaint and
subsequent investigation have not been recorded here at the request of the
family, to maintain their anonymity,

[87]
Human Rights Watch interview with family members of Iván Baruch
Núñez Mendieta, Torreón, Coahuila, April 24, 2012. The
identity of the individuals has been withheld out of concern for their safety;
Coahuila State Prosecutors Office, investigation (averiguación previa)
95-2011, Mesa I, Lic. José Juan Morales.

[92]
Human Rights Watch group interview with eight prosecutors from the Coahuila
State Prosecutor’s Office, including prosecutors assigned to the special
sub-unit tasked with investigating disappearances, Saltillo, Coahuila, April
27, 2012.

[96]
Letter from Oscar Arias Ocampo, judicial police agent (agente de la
policía ministerial), Nuevo Casas Grandes, Chihuahua State Judicial
Police (Chihuahua Agencia Estatal de Investigación), to Dr. David
Martínez Garrido, coordinator of forensic and legal medical services
(coordinador de la Oficina Servicios Periciales y Medicina Legal), Nuevo Casas
Grandes, file 1654/2010, investigation file (carpeta de investigación)
5326-000124/2009, Nuevo Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, January 5, 2010 (on file with
Human Rights Watch). In the letter, the judicial police agent instructs the
coordinator to take photographs and gather as much evidence as possible
concerning the car found in the lot of the judicial police in order to
“help clear up the disappearance of three people.” (“ayudar
con el esclarecimiento de la desaparición de las tres personas”.) The
letter confirms that the victims’ car was found in the possession of the
judicial police a day after they disappeared.

[102]
Human Rights Watch interviews with Raymundo Ramos, director of Comité de
Derechos Humanos de Nuevo Laredo, Monterrey, Nuevo León, June 5, 2012.
For a more detailed summary of these cases, see previous section
“Enforced Disappearances by the Navy.”

[112]
UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, Mission to Mexico,
Addendum, Report of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary
Disappearances, A/HRC/19/58/Add.2, December 20, 2011, para. 69, http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_e.aspx?m=119
(accessed August 8, 2012).

[113]
Human Rights Watch interview with relatives of Iván Baruch
Núñez Mendieta, Torreón, Coahuila, April 24, 2012. The
identity of the individuals has been withheld out of concern for their safety.

[122]
Ibid. According to the victim’s father, his complaint was taken by Hilda
González, from the division of the Coahuila State Prosecutor’s
Office dedicated to attention to victims and crime prevention (atención
a víctimas y prevención delito), during which meeting commander
Darío de la Rosa was present.

[124]
Human Rights Watch interview with the wife of Sebastián Pérez
(pseudonym), Torreón, Coahuila, April 25, 2012. Pérez was
disappeared in August 2011. The identity of Pérez and his wife have been
withheld out of concern for their safety.

[125]
Federal Prosecutor’s Office, Coahuila Delegation (Delegacion Estatal
Coahuila), Testimony of Complainant (Declaración del Denunciante),
AP/PGR/COAH/SALT-III/18/00/2012, January 14, 2012 (on file with Human Rights
Watch). An investigation was also opened by the Coahuila State
Prosecutor’s Office, with whom the families registered an official
complaint on November 23, 2011, but prosecutors did not provide the
victims’ families with copies of their complaints. Coahuila State
Prosecutor’s Office, Special Prosecutor’s Office for Investigating
Disappeared Persons (Fiscalía Especial para la Investigación de
Asuntos de Personas Desaparecidas), APP-0133/2011-B, Oficio 8911/2011,
Saltillo, Coahuila, December 8, 2011 (on file with Human Rights Watch). The child
of Elsa Judith Pecina Riojas and Wilfredo Álvarez Valdez was found,
unharmed, on November 25, 2011—10 days after being abducted—on a
park bench in Piedras Negras.

[126]
Human Rights Watch interview with relatives of Perla Liliana Pecina Riojas,
Elsa Judith Pecina Riojas, and Wilfredo Álvarez Valdez, Saltillo,
Coahuila, April 24, 2012. The identities of the individuals have been withheld
out of concern for their safety.

[128]
The recordings of security cameras are often automatically erased at regular
intervals, usually every one to three days, prosecutors told Human Rights
Watch. Therefore, waiting a period of weeks or months to request such footage
virtually ensures that the relevant recording has already been erased.

[129]
Human Rights Watch interview with relative of victim, Monterrey, Nuevo
León, June 4, 2012. The identities of the initial kidnapping victim (who
was eventually released) and his relative have been withheld out of concern for
their safety.

[131]
GPS refers to global positioning system, which uses satellite technology to
pinpoint a location. Many two-way radios in Mexico provide GPS tracking, which
can be used to determine the location of the device.

[133]
The families were not given a copy of their complaint. According to relatives,
prosecutors informed them that the case file of the investigation opened by the
Nuevo León State Prosecutor’s Office is 175/2011-III-3.

[141]
National Human Rights Commission, Segunda Visitaduría General, Oficio
V2/49028, Expediente CNDH/2/2009/1628/Q, October 15, 2009. The letter, which is
directed to the family members of the two victims, summarizes the complaint
received by the Coahuila State Human Rights Commission and the findings of a
brief fact-finding inquiry conducted by the National Human Rights Commission.
It also informs the victims’ families of the commission’s decision
to close its investigation into the alleged disappearances in spite of
compelling evidence collected by its own investigators that merited further
inquiry.

[156]
Ministry of Defense, Subsecretariat of Legislative Relations
(Subsecretaría de Enlace Legislativo), Num. de Oficio 67684, report
regarding operations carried out by the Army on April 5, 2009, in
Torreón, Coahuila, sent to Lic. Gonzalo Altamirano Dimas, Subsecretariat
of Legislative Relations, Ministry of the Interior (Subsecretario de Enlace
Legislativo de la Secretaría de Gobernación), August 16, 2009.

[167]
Human Rights Watch interview with Blanca Martínez and Alma
García, director and social worker for Forces United for Our Disappeared in
Coahuila (Fuerzas Unidas por Nuestros Desaparecidos en Coahuila, or FUUNDEC), a
coalition of the families of the disappeared in Saltillo, Coahuila, April 23,
2012.

[179]
Human Rights Watch telephone interview with Adriana Moreno Becerril, April 30,
2012. According to Moreno Becerril, calls were made at 3:32 a.m., 3:34 a.m.,
3:37 a.m., 3:38 a.m., 1:20 p.m., and 6:09 p.m.—after the victims had been
abducted—to numbers in Coahuila and Tamaulipas that could have been used
to locate the victims. However, cell phone records were not obtained until
after a second round of disappearances had occurred in the same location, and
evidence suggests the second round was carried out by the same officials in
collaboration with members of an organized crime group.

[180]
Coahuila State Prosecutor’s Office, testimony of Omar Delgado
García (Declaración de Omar Delgado García), A.C.
039/2009, October 15, 2009 (on file with Human Rights Watch). In his testimony,
Delgado García provided the names of police officers who he said had
collaborated with members of the Zetas to carry out the disappearances. The
widespread use of torture by authorities in Mexico to extract forced
confessions—as documented in previous reports by Human Rights Watch such
as Neither Rights Nor Security—should be taken into account when weighing
the truthfulness and evidentiary value of Delgado García’s
testimony, and other alleged admissions of guilt (see previous chapter on
“Methodology”).

[187]
UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, Mission to Mexico,
Addendum, Report of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary
Disappearances, A/HRC/19/58/Add.2, December 20, 2011, para. 12, http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_e.aspx?m=119
(accessed February 7, 2013).

[189]
Online complaint filed by Reginaldo Sánchez Garza, grandfather of
Gerardo Heath Garza, with Office of the President (Oficina de la Presidencia de
la República), Federal Network of Services for the Citizenry (Red
Federal de Servicio a la Ciudadanía), April 9, 2011 (on file with Human
Rights Watch).

[190]
Letter from Juan Manuel Llera Blanco, Federal Network of Services for the
Citizenry, Office of the President of Mexico, to Reginaldo Sánchez
Garza, Folio 22232723053, April 13, 2011 (on file with Human Rights Watch).

[191]
Letter from Juan Manuel Llera Blanco, Federal Network of Services for the
Citizenry, Office of the President of Mexico, to Reginaldo Sánchez
Garza, Folio 22236460-54, May 6, 2011 (on file with Human Rights Watch).

[192]
Letter from Daniel Castro Tello, Ministry of Public Security, Office of the
Technical Secretary, to Reginaldo Sánchez Garza, Oficio número
SSP/ST/00291/2011, April 15, 2011. Although the letter is dated April 15, 2011,
it was not delivered to Reginaldo Sánchez Garza until June 13, 2011.

[199] “Working Minutes: Follow-up Meeting on the Implementation of
Protection Measures for Raymundo Ramos Vázquez and Others” (Minuta
de Trabajo: Reunión de Seguimiento a la Implementación de Medidas
de Protección a favor de Raymundo Ramos Vázquez y Otros), Nuevo
Laredo, Tamaulipas, December 9, 2011. The working minutes and agreements
derived from the meeting are signed by representatives of the Ministry of the
Interior, the state government of Tamaulipas, the National Human Rights
Commission, the Army, the Navy, Raymundo Ramos Vázquez, several
victims’ relatives, and others (on file with Human Rights Watch).

[202]
Human Rights Watch interview with eight prosecutors from Coahuila State
Prosecutor’s Office assigned to special unit investigating
disappearances, April 27, 2012, Saltillo, Coahuila. At the request of the
prosecutors, their names have been withheld.

[207]
Human Rights Watch interview with mother of disappeared person, Saltillo,
Coahuila, April 24, 2012. The identities of the mother and the victim have been
withheld out of concern for their safety.

[210]
Human Rights Watch interview with María Juliana Ramírez Camacho,
aunt of José René Luna Ramírez, Monterrey, Nuevo
León, December 11, 2010. According to the aunt, the number of the case
file with the state prosecutor’s office is AP 150/2007-II. For a full
summary of the case, see Human Rights Watch, Neither Rights Nor Security,
“Enforced Disappearances of Two State Police Officers, Santa Catarina,
Nuevo León,” November 9, 2011, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2011/11/09/neither-rights-nor-security-0.

[214]
Human Rights Watch interview with family member of the victim, Saltillo,
Coahuila, April 25, 2012. The identities of the individuals have been withheld
out of concern for their safety; Coahuila State Prosecutor’s Office,
Report: Disappearance of a Person (Acta Circunstanciada: Desaparición de
Persona), No SMRD-136/2009, Saltillo, Coahuila, September 8, 2009 (on file with
Human Rights Watch).

[215]
Ibid. Federal prosecutors did not open an investigation into the case until
2012; the case had previously been handled by state prosecutors. In the
approximately three years during which they were in charge of the
investigation, state officials had never visited the ranch, the families told
Human Rights Watch. According to the families, the federal investigation case
file number is AP/PGR/COAH/SALT-I/009/DD/2011.

[220]
Coahuila State Prosecutor’s Office, Testimony: Disappearance of a Person
(Acta Cincunstanciada Desaparición de Persona), eyewitness testimony by
the brother of another man disappeared on the same day, Número de
Expediente: A.C. 044/2011, Saltillo, Coahuila, March 14, 2011 (on file with
Human Rights Watch). In the testimony, witness testifies to having seen his
brother, Gutierrez, and a third victim arbitrarily detained by police and
loaded into the back of a pick-up truck during a raid the previous day.

[221]
Human Rights Watch interview with the mother of Patricio Gutierrez Cruz
(pseudonym), Saltillo, Coahuila, April 24, 2012. The identities of the mother
and the victim have been kept anonymous out of concern for their safety.

[234]International Committee
of the Red Cross (ICRC), Protocol Additional to the Geneva
Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of
International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), adopted by the Diplomatic Conference on the Reaffirmation and Development of
International Humanitarian Law Applicable in Armed Conflicts in Geneva
June 8, 1977, entered into force December 7, 1979, art. 32, “In the
implementation of this Section, the activities of the High Contracting Parties,
of the Parties to the conflict and of the international humanitarian
organizations mentioned in the Conventions and in this Protocol shall be
prompted mainly by the right of families to know the fate of their
relatives.”

[235]
UN General Assembly, International Convention for the Protection of All
Persons from Enforced Disappearance, adopted January 12, 2007, G.A.
res. 61/177, UN Doc. A/61/177 (2006), entered into force December 23, 2010,
ratified by Mexico March 18, 2008.

[240]Quinteros v. Uruguay, UN Human Rights Committee, communication no.
107/1981, July 21, 1983, para. 14. The UN Human Rights Committee concluded that
the mother of a disappeared person was entitled to compensation as a victim for
the suffering caused by the failure of the state to provide her with
information.

[242]
For a more complete summary of the history of the case, see “The
‘Disappearance’ of Rosendo Radilla,” Human Rights Watch, Uniform
Impunity: Mexico's Misuse of Military Justice to Prosecute Abuses in
Counternarcotics and Public Security Operations, April 29, 2009, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2009/04/28/uniform-impunity.

[262]
Human Rights Watch interview with mother of Salvador Moya (pseudonym),
Monterrey, Nuevo León, June 5, 2012. The identities of the victim and
his mother have been withheld out of concern for their safety.

[266]
Human Rights Watch interview with sister of Samuel Álvarez (pseudonym),
and mother of the child, Mexico City, September 21, 2012. The identity of the
mother, her child, and her brother have been withheld out of concern for their
safety.

[275]
For an example of Villaseñor’s public comments prior to the
attack, see Sanjuana Martínez, “More Complaints against Members of
Navy for Kidnapping Civilians” (Más quejas contra marinos por los
secuestros de civiles), La Jornada, July 3, 2011, http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2011/07/03/politica/002n1pol
(accessed August 29, 2012).

[293]International Convention for
the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, art. 24 (6).

[294]
Mexican Institute of Social Security (Instituto Mexicano de Seguridad Social),
“Institutional Programs,” http://www.imss.gob.mx/english/Pages/institutional_programs.aspx
(accessed December 15, 2012). For example, one IMSS program offers education
and meals to children in childcare centers from the time they are a month old
to four years old; children of working mothers, as well as children of fathers
who are widowed or divorced and are primary caregivers, are among those
eligible. Mexican Institute of Social Security, “Application for
Admission and Registration to IMSS Nurseries” (Solicitud de Ingreso e
Inscripción a Guarderías del IMSS), http://www.imss.gob.mx/tramites/catalogo/Pages/imss_01_006.aspx
(accessed December 15, 2012).

[300] Ibid. The law does permit an accelerated
recognition of “presumption of death” for “individuals who
have disappeared taking part in a war, or by being on a ship that wrecks, or in
a flood or a similar natural disaster” (“individuos que hayan
desaparecido al tomar parte en una guerra, o por encontrarse a bordo de un
buque que naufrague, o al verificarse una inundación u otro siniestro
semejante”). In these circumstances,
the law says, the victim’s family is not required to first seek a
“declaration of absence,” and may instead solicit a
“presumption of death” as soon as two years after the incident.
Although there is no explicit mention of enforced disappearances or
disappearances perpetrated by organized crime among the causes that are
eligible for this exception, a lawyer could make a case for such crimes to be
included. Nevertheless, the determination of whether such cases are eligible
would be at the discretion of a judge. Moreover, even by this accelerated
process, the speediest recognition of death for the family would be two years
after the victim’s disappearance.

[301] UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary
Disappearances, “General Comment on article 19 of the Declaration,”
Report of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances 1997. Document
E/CN.4/1998/43., art. 74.

[302]
For a more comprehensive analysis of PROVÍCTIMA’s failure to
assist families of the disappeared, see subsequent chapter, “Shortcomings
of PROVÍCTIMA.”

[303]
Human Rights Watch interview with wife of one of the victims, Monterrey, Nuevo
León, June 3, 2012. The identities of the husband, wife and children
have been withheld out of concern for their safety.

[322]
Investigative reporting by Marcela Turati for Proceso magazine found
that—according to information obtained through public information
requests—of the first 66 individuals who PROVÍCTIMA claimed to
have “found” (encontrada): “24 of them decided to leave their
homes without specifying where they were going; 10 got into fights with their
families and were staying with other relatives; four were in pre-trial
detention and two in hospitals; three were migrants passing through Mexico;
three did not have a telephone signal or money to get in touch; one was under arraigo
detention, another was in a shelter for victims of trafficking, and for
three no information was provided. The other 13 were dead.”
(“24 de ellas decidieron salir de su domicilio sin especificar a
dónde iban; 10 se pelearon con su familia y eran hospedadas por otros
familiares; cuatro estaban en prisión preventiva y dos en hospitales;
tres eran migrantes de paso por México; tres no tenían
señal de teléfono o dinero para comunicarse; una estaba
arraigada, otra en un refugio para víctimas de trata, y de tres no hay
datos. Otras 13 estaban muertas”.) Turati, Marcela. “PROVÍCTIMA, the Presidential Charade”
(Províctima, la mascarada presidencial), Proceso, October 25,
2012, http://www.proceso.com.mx/?p=323481 (accessed January 31, 2013).

[323]
“PROVÍCTIMA Contributes to the Discovery of 135 Persons,”
November 28, 2012.

[334] Centro de Investigación y Capacitación Propuesta
Cívica por la justicia y memoria de las personas desaparecidas en
México. “Database of Missing
Persons” (Base de Datos de Personas No Localizadas), http://desaparecidosenmexico.wordpress.com/descargas/
(accessed January 1, 2013). For more comprehensive explanation on the origins
and shortcomings of this database, see forthcoming chapter, “Failure of
the Calderón Government to Develop National Registries.”

[356] Constitution of Mexico (Constitución Política de los
Estados Unidos Mexicanos), http://www.diputados.gob.mx/LeyesBiblio/pdf/1.pdf
(accessed September 16, 2011), art. 16. Mexico’s constitution
requires authorities to obtain a court order before carrying out searches and
arrests. For an arrest warrant to be issued, the prosecutor who solicits it
must show a judge that evidence of a crime exists, that the suspect is linked
to the crime, and that information supports the suspect’s probable
culpability.

[372]
Nuevo León State Prosecutor’s Office, testimony of witness from
night of abduction, Monterrey, Nuevo León, AP 373/2010-I-1, February 16,
2012 (on file with Human Rights Watch). The identity of the individual has been
withheld out of concern for his/her safety.

[382]
On November 8 and 9, 2011, the delegation from Human Rights Watch also
presented the findings in separate meetings to ranking members of
Calderón’s cabinet, including Attorney General Marisela Morales,
Secretary of the Interior Francisco Blake Mora, Foreign Minister Patricia
Espinosa, and the Admiral of the Navy Mariano Francisco Saynez Mendoza.

[395]
An even more troubling omission was evident in the case of Miriam Isaura
López Vargas, who said she was sexually assaulted and tortured by
soldiers on a military base in Baja California in February 2011. The Ministry
of the Interior claimed the only open inquiry into López’s case
was a criminal investigation against her. However, a lawyer representing the
ministry was present at a meeting on December 14, 2011, together with
PROVÍCTIMA and a human rights organization representing López, in
which it was agreed that the victim would present a formal complaint the
following day before the Special Prosecutor for Violent Crimes Against Women
and Human Trafficking (FEVIMTRA). Indeed, the ministry sent an official letter
to the victim’s lawyer corroborating the agreements of the meeting, and
an official from the ministry accompanied the victim on December 15 when she
made her formal complaint, which led the special prosecutor’s office to
open an investigation into the abuses she had suffered. The ministry’s
lack of awareness of investigations in which its representatives have directly
participated raises doubts about its ability or will to follow up on other
cases in which it was not directly involved. See Letter from Carlos
Garduño Salinas, Deputy General Director (Director General Adjunto),
Subsecretariat for Legal Affairs and Human Rights, Division for the Promotion
and Defense of Human Rights, Ministry of the Interior (Subsecretaría de
Asuntos Jurídicos y Derechos Humanos, Unidad para la Promoción y
Defensa de los Derechos Humanos, Secretaría de Gobernación) to
Juan Carlos Gutiérrez Contreras, Director of the Mexican Commission of
Defense and Promotion of Human Rights (Director General de la Comisión
Mexicana de Defensa y Promoción de los Derechos Humanos),
UPDDH/911/6286/2011, December 14, 2011; Miriam Isaura López Vargas, complaint
before the Federal Prosecutor’s Office (Procuraduría General de la
República), AP/PGR/FEVIMTRA-C/139/2011, on December 15, 2011.

[396]
Articles 116 and 117 of the Federal Code of Criminal Procedure (Código
Federal de Procedimientos Penales) establishes the obligation of all citizens
who learn about crimes—and particularly state officials—to report
them to the prosecutor’s office. Additionally, article 4 of the Law of
the Federal Prosecutor’s Office (Ley Orgánica de la Procuraduría
General de la República) states that when the office is aware of a
crime, it shall immediately communicate that information in writing to the
competent authority. In cases of torture, according to article 11 of the
Federal Law to Prevent and Punish Torture (Ley Federal para Prevenir y
Sancionar la Tortura), an official who knows about likely acts of torture and
fails to denounce them may be punished with up to three years in prison. These
obligations in federal law are underscored by similar requirements in state
laws, and mandated by international human rights treaties, which since
Mexico’s December 2010 constitutional reform enjoy parity with national
laws. Código Federal de Procedimientos Penales, Diario
Oficial de la Federación, 1934,
http://www.diputados.gob.mx/LeyesBiblio/pdf/7.pdf, arts. 116 and 117; Ley
Orgánica de la Procuraduría General de la República,
Diario Oficial de la Federación, 2009,
http://www.diputados.gob.mx/LeyesBiblio/pdf/LOPGR.pdf, art. 4; Ley Federal para
Prevenir y Sancionar la Tortura, Diario Oficial de la Federación, 1991,
http://www.diputados.gob.mx/LeyesBiblio/pdf/129.pdf, art. 11.

[397]
UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. Mission to Mexico,
Addendum, Report of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary
Disappearances, A/HRC/19/58/Add.2, December 20, 2011, para. 103, http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_e.aspx?m=119
(accessed August 8, 2012). The Working Group recommended the Mexican government
ensure the “establishment and regular maintenance of a database of
personal information on victims of enforced disappearances nationwide (both for
the federal and state courts), including genetic information, primarily DNA and
tissue samples obtained from human remains and the relatives of victims, with
their prior consent.”

[409]
Human Rights Watch Skype interview with Jaime López Aranda, head of the
Directorate for the National System of Public Security (Consejo del Sistema
Nacional de Seguridad Pública), Ministry of the Interior, Mexico City,
November 28, 2012.

[411]
Human Rights Watch interview with Jaime López Aranda, head of the
Directorate for the National System of Public Security (Consejo del Sistema
Nacional de Seguridad Pública), Ministry of the Interior, Mexico City,
April 20, 2012.

[418]
“Base de Desaparecidos” (Database of Disappeared), obtained by
Human Rights Watch on November 27, 2012 (on file with Human Rights Watch).
Analysis based on number of cases for which information is provided in a column
marked “Investigation/Case File” (Averiguación Previa/Carpeta
de Investigación).

[420]
For example, in a May 2010 interview with CNN, President Calderón was
asked about the estimated 23,000 drug-related killings that had been reported
from the time he took office to the time of the interview. Calderón
responded, “Most of that -- 90 percent of those casualties are of -- are
casualties of criminals themselves that are fighting each other. It's very
clear for us according -- with our records, that it's possible to understand,
for instance, in one particular homicide, what could be the probable reasons
for that, and 90 percent of that are criminals linked in one way or another to
the gangs…Two percent of that, less than two percent, are innocent
civilians, yes, more of less killed by the criminals.” “Interview
with Mexican President Felipe Calderon,” The Situation Room, CNN, May 19,
2010, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1005/19/sitroom.01.html
(accessed January 14, 2013).

[421]Brian Finucane,
“Enforced Disappearance as a Crime Under International Law: A Neglected
Origin in the Laws of War”, The Yale Journal of International Law, Vol.
35 (2010), p. 171.

[422]Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Rome
Statute), A/CONF.183/9, July 17, 1998 entered into force July 1, 2002, arts.
7(1)(i) and 7(2)(i); International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC),
Henckaerts & Doswald-Beck, eds., Customary International Humanitarian Law
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press 2005), p. 340-343. Article 7(1)(i) of the 1998
ICC Statute, Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, July 17, 1998,
2187 U.N.T.S. 90, provides that “[e]nforced disappearance of
persons” constitutes a crime against humanity. Article 7(2)(i) defines
enforced disappearance as: the arrest, detention or abduction of persons by, or
with the authorization, support or acquiescence of, a State or a political
organization, followed by a refusal to acknowledge that deprivation of freedom
or to give information on the fate or whereabouts of those persons, with the
intention of removing them from the protection of the law for a prolonged
period of time.

[424]Mexico
is also a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
(ICCPR), adopted December 16, 1966, G.A. Res. 2200A (XXI), 21 U.N. GAOR Supp.
(No. 16) at 52, U.N. Doc. A/6316 (1966), 999 U.N.T.S. 171, entered into force
March 23, 1976, ratified by Mexico on March 23, 1981; Likewise, in the
Velásquez Rodríguez case, the Inter-American Court held that a
disappearance violated the right to life, liberty and security, personal
integrity and freedom from torture, Inter-American Court of Human Rights,
Velásquez Rodríguez Case, Judgment of July 29, 1988,
Inter-Am.Ct.H.R., (Ser. C) No. 4 (1988), para.
185.

[426]Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of
Persons, art. 3; International Convention for the Protection of All Persons
from Enforced Disappearance, art. 8(1)(b); UN Working Group on Enforced or
Involuntary Disappearances, “General Comment on Enforced Disappearance as
a Continuous Crime,” Report of the Working Group on Enforced or
Involuntary Disappearances, January 26, 2011, UN Doc. A/HRC/16/48, http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Disappearances/GC-EDCC.pdf (accessed February 8,
2013).

[432]International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), adopted December 16, 1966, G.A.
Res. 2200A (XXI), 21 U.N. GAOR Supp. (No. 16) at 52, U.N. Doc. A/6316 (1966),
999 U.N.T.S. 171, entered into force March 23, 1976, ratified by Mexico on
March 23, 1981, art. 2(3)(a). The duty to investigate and punish derives from
the right to a legal remedy that treaties extend to victims of violations.
Under international law, states have an obligation to provide victims of human
rights violations with an effective remedy—including justice, truth, and
adequate reparations—after they suffer a violation. Under the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), states have an
obligation "to ensure that any person whose rights or freedoms as herein
recognized are violated shall have an effective remedy." At the regional
level, the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR) states that every
individual has "the right to simple and prompt recourse, or any other
effective recourse, to a competent court or tribunal for protection against
acts that violate his fundamental rights recognized by the constitution or laws
of the state concerned or by this Convention, even though such violation may
have been committed by persons acting in the course of their official
duties." The Inter-American Court has held that this right imposes an
obligation upon states to provide victims with effective judicial remedies.

[444]
UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. Mission to Mexico,
Addendum, Report of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary
Disappearances, A/HRC/19/58/Add.2, December 20, 2011, http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_e.aspx?m=119
(accessed August 8, 2012 , para. 13.

[446]UN
Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. Mission to Mexico,
Addendum, Report of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary
Disappearances, A/HRC/19/58/Add.2, December 20, 2011, http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_e.aspx?m=119
(accessed August 8, 2012), para. 13.

[448]
UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. Mission to Mexico,
Addendum, Report of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary
Disappearances, A/HRC/19/58/Add.2, December 20, 2011, http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_e.aspx?m=119
(accessed August 8, 2012), para. 13.

[449]UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances.
Mission to Mexico, Addendum, Report of the Working Group on Enforced or
Involuntary Disappearances, A/HRC/19/58/Add.2, December 20, 2011, http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_e.aspx?m=119
(accessed August 8, 2012), para. 13.

In response to Human Rights Watch’s question of
how many investigations had been opened by military prosecutors into alleged
human rights violations committed by members of the military against civilians,
SEDENA provided the following numbers by year: in 2007, 210 investigations; in
2008, 913 investigations; in 2009, 1,293 investigations; and in 2010, 968
investigations. According to the second response (000700053712), military
prosecutors opened 301 investigations from January to April 2012 into alleged
crimes by members of the military against civilians. According to the third
response (000700053812), military prosecutors opened 1,128 investigations in
2011 into alleged crimes by members of the military against civilians.

[470]
It is also not clear what quantity of money is equivalent of a fine of one day.
The issue of assigning fines is not addressed in the Code of Military Justice,
which only prescribes three types of punishments: prison (prisión),
suspension (suspensión), or firing (destitución). See Code of
Military Justice, art. 122.

The aforementioned document of the military
erroneously records key information from the case. The official document says
that the victim was beaten and detained on June 20, 2009 by members of the
Army, and that his body was found on June 8, 2009 (implying his body was found
before he was detained). In reality, his body was found on July 8, 2009.

[477]
Ibid.; See also National Human Rights Commission, Recommendation 40/2011, June
30, 2011. The military document does not indicate the year when the two
military personnel were convicted, stating only that the judgment was issued on
January 23. Nonetheless, according to the National Human Rights Commission, at
the time it issued its recommendation in the case—on June 30,
2011—the Army denied that any military personnel had participated in the
crime. (The recommendation states: “In accordance with the information
provided by the Army, personnel within the jurisdiction of the 21st Military
Zone, which includes the 37th Infantry Batallion, had not participated in the
acts attributed to them.”) (“De acuerdo con la
información rendida por la Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional, las
unidades en la jurisdicción de la 21/a. Zona Militar no habían
participado en los hechos que se les atribuían, entre esas unidades se
incluye el 37/o. Batallón de Infantería”.) As a
result, it can be deduced that the sentence referred to in the military
document was handed down after the Commission’s recommendation was
issued— in January of 2012— approximately two months before one
member of the military was granted conditional liberty.

[480]Rome
Statute, art. 78(1). See also; Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY Statute), S.C. Res. 827, U.N.Doc. S/RES/827
(1993), as amended, Art 24(2): “In imposing the sentences, the Trial
Chambers should take into account such factors as the gravity of the offence
and the individual circumstances of the convicted person.”

[481]For a
listing of a number of cases from the International Criminal Tribunal for the
former Yugoslavia that address the importance of gravity of the crime in sentencing,
see Human Rights Watch, Genocide, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity: A
Topical Digest of the Case Law of the International Criminal Tribunal for the
Former Yugoslavia, (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2006),
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/07/26/genocide-war-crimes-and-crimes-against-humanity-0,
pp. 544-45.

[482]International
Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, art.
7.

[493]As
noted in our report, Human Rights Watch omitted the identities in exceptional
cases where victims, their relatives, and witnesses requested that their names
be omitted to protect their identities, out of fear of reprisals.

[495]On June 8, 2011,
Human Rights Watch sent a request asking Dr. Poiré—of the
approximately 35,000 alleged drug-related homicides from December 2006 to
January 2010—how many of these crimes had resulted in criminal sentences.
In his July 5 response, Dr. Poiré stated that “the investigation
as well as all of the files…that relate to it are strictly classified,”
citing as justification the Federal Code of Criminal Procedure (el
Código Federal de Procedimientos Penales). However, the information that
we requested related to legal proceedings that had ended in criminal sentences,
thus nullifying any grounds for reserving the requested information.

[498]Ministry
of Defense (SEDENA), response to information request 0000700066911 submitted by
Human Rights Watch on April 18, 2011. Human Rights Watch received a partial
response on May 3, 2011, for which we submitted a follow-up request on June 27,
2011, and received a response from SEDENA, 0000700203322, on July 5, 2011.

[503]Ibid. According to
the letter, “On the other hand, events as tragic and complex as the
multiple homicides that occurred in San Fernando, Tamaulipas; the killing of a
group of young students in Villas de Salvárcar in Ciudad Juárez;
or the homicide of multiple people in the Fire [sic] at the Casino Royale in
Monterrey were cleared up, to name a few.”

[504]The case refers to
the high-profile killing of a group of students at a party during the night of
January 30 to 31, 2010, in the Villas de Salvárcar neighborhood of
Ciudad Juárez. President Calderón initially said the massacre was
the result of a confrontation between rival bands of “gangsters” (pandilleros),
and dismissed the victims as gang members. In the face of outcry from the
victims’ families, the federal government was subsequently forced to
issue a public apology. See for example Rubén Villalpando,
“Gómez Mont Offers Apology for Calderón’s Mistaken
Words” (Gómez Mont ofrece disculpas por palabras equivocadas de
Calderón), La Jornada, February 9, 2010, http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2010/02/09/politica/003n1pol
(accessed Oct. 15, 2011).

[513]“Speech
of the Secretary of Defense during Commemorative Ceremony XCIX of the
Anniversary of the March of Loyalty” (Discurso del C. General Secretario
de la Defensa Nacional, en la Ceremonia Conmemorativa al XCIX Aniversario de la
Marcha de la Lealtad), speech, February 9, 2012,
http://www.sedena.gob.mx/index.php/sala-de-prensa/discursos (accessed February
12, 2012).

[514]“Speech of
the Secretary of Defense during the Day of the Army” (Discurso del C. General
Secretario de la Defensa Nacional, en la Ceremonia Conmemorativa al Día
del Ejército), speech, February 19, 2012,
http://www.sedena.gob.mx/index.php/sala-de-prensa/discursos (accessed February
22, 2012).

[515]For example, Human
Rights Watch analyzed 74 cases where the National Human Rights Commission had
found the Army had committed torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.
In roughly two-thirds of the cases—51 out of 74 cases—we found that
acts of torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment documented by the
commission were classified by military justice officials as less serious crimes
such as “assault” or “abuse of authority.” These kinds
of crimes would continue to be investigated and prosecuted in military jurisdiction
under Calderón’s 2010 reform proposal. Human Rights Watch, Neither
Rights Nor Security, pp. 56-58.